The Angel of Highgate (9 page)

“Geoffrey! You’re awake!”

Thraxton’s eyes slitted open.

“How long…” His mouth was dry as sand and he could barely speak. “How long…?”

Algernon leapt to his feet and leaned over his old friend.

“Three days.”

“Three days?” Thraxton put a hand to the side of his head and moaned.

“You are fortunate to be alive! You’ve got a lump the size of a goose egg on your head. Do you remember anything?”

Thraxton opened his eyes a little wider, straining to focus on his friend’s face.

“I remember the angel: the violet eyes… alabaster skin… long, dark hair. The touch of her hand, cool, like marble made flesh.”

“Angel?” Algernon sighed. “You’re rambling, Geoffrey. The sexton and I found you lying in a grave. You’d been coshed by Resurrection Men out body-snatching. No doubt to satisfy the insatiable demand of our respected medical colleges. It’s a wonder you are not being dissected by a class of student surgeons right now!”

Thraxton struggled to raise himself in the bed.

“What are you doing? Lie still!”

“Doing? I’m trying to sit up. Help me!”

Against his better judgment, Algernon dragged his friend upright. “Perhaps I should call for the nurse,” he said, looking around for the matron.

Thraxton grabbed his friend’s sleeve to prevent him from leaving. “I was dead, Algy. An angel’s touch brought me back from the abyss of death.”

“There was no angel, Geoffrey. It’s just part of your delirium. You’ve been unconscious for three days.”

“No! I saw her,” Thraxton insisted. “She was an angel. A dark angel in the night.”

“You’re rambling. I’ll fetch the nurse.”

“Never mind the nurse,” Thraxton said, throwing back the bedclothes and tottering out of bed. “Call us a carriage.” As he gained his feet, he staggered and would have fallen had he not grabbed the brass bedstead for support.

“Geoffrey, this time I will not allow you to have your way. Get back in that bed. There is no way you are leaving this hospital. Do you understand? I absolutely forbid it!”

* * *

“This is madness! Sheer madness!” Algernon complained. “If anything happens, I suppose I shall be to blame.”

He and Thraxton were seated in a hansom cab that plodded up Swain’s Lane toward the front gates of the London cemetery at Highgate.

“Do stop wittering, Algy,” Thraxton said, a hand held over his eyes to shield them from the light. “I’ve got a beastly headache and your constant blathering is only making it worse.”

Ten minutes later they passed through the iron gates of Highgate Cemetery and proceeded on foot. By now it was late afternoon, dense black cloud shrouded the sky, and the two men shambled through the disintegrating twilight. Thraxton was still unsteady on his feet, and had to lean on Algernon’s shoulder for support. They made their way along the winding paths until they arrived at the grave that Thraxton had fallen into. In the days that had passed since the incident with Fowler’s men, the London Cemetery Company had hastily filled in the grave and placed an iron mortgate atop it to deter any further attempts by Resurrection Men.

“This is it,” Thraxton said, “the spot where I had my tussle with the three ruffians.” He removed his hand from Algernon’s shoulder and shuffled to the neighboring grave, gazing up at the stone angel perched atop its pedestal. “This is her. The angel,” Thraxton said, his voice falling into a reverent whisper.

The stone angel stared down at them, head slightly tilted, the blind stone eyes stunned with loss.

“She came alive, Algy. I saw her step down and kneel over me. She was a spirit made real.”

Algernon looked away, trying to conceal his open skepticism. His eyes were drawn to a crumpled black shape in the grass and he stooped to pick it up. It was wet with dew, but as he unfolded the wadded ball, he instantly recognized what it was. He cleared his throat to snatch his friend’s attention.

“What?” Thraxton asked.

“A glove. A woman’s glove. Proof, I would say, that your angel was no visitor from the spirit world.” He found a label inside the glove and examined it. “Unless those who have passed over to the other side are now having their gloves made by T. Sayers of Oxford Street, London.”

At the news, doubt clouded Thraxton’s face. Then a faint gray wisp of smoke swirled about them. Sniffing a familiar scent, Thraxton looked up.

A white-haired gentleman in a battered cap stood close by, observing them. A lit lantern dangled loosely from his fingertips. Cradled in the crook of his other arm was a firearm with the heft and girth of a small naval cannon. The elderly man drew the lit pipe from between his lips and nodded to them with a good-natured grin.

“Ah,” Algernon said, recognizing the man. “Now, Geoffrey, here is the true angel you owe your life to.”

S
ilver smoke swirled, curling into graceful arabesques that formed, shivered, and collapsed as they floated up and crashed against the rough wooden beams and cracked plaster ceiling of the tiny cottage. The monstrous elephant gun rested on two hooks above the fireplace. Now the owner of the firearm, the sexton of Highgate Cemetery, rammed a poker into the seething red coals, agitating them until the fire flared and a crackle of sparks swooped up the chimney flue. Satisfied, the sexton settled the iron poker in its stand and dropped heavily into a creaky, much-repaired cane chair. Algernon and Thraxton sat in the tiny parlor’s only other furniture: two battered and threadbare armchairs. All three men puffed at cigars Thraxton had produced from the humidor he kept tucked in his overcoat pocket.

“That’s quite a weapon,” Thraxton acknowledged, drawing on his cigar.

“I calls her Old Bessie,” the sexton said. “After me late wife. I keeps her handy in case the Resurrection Men come nosin’ around. The din of Old Bessie goin’ off is enough to shake your bowels loose. Loud as a bleedin’ cannon!”

The sexton functioned as both a caretaker responsible for the upkeep of the cemetery and as night watchman. Algernon and Thraxton had tarried too long at the cemetery, and so when it was discovered their cab driver had given up on his passengers and driven off, the sexton invited the pair to wait in his tiny cottage until a carriage might be summoned from Highgate Village.

“Yes, I can quite agree with that assertion,” Thraxton said. “And a damned good thing, too.”

All three men chuckled and puffed, but then Thraxton burst out: “Ah! But I am quite forgetting!” He reached for the walking stick next to his chair. “What is a cigar unless it’s accompanied by brandy?”

Thraxton possessed a large collection of walking sticks of which this was his favorite: the stick with the gold phoenix handle. He gave the phoenix a twist and it unscrewed in his hands. Then he tipped up the cane until out slid a slender glass tube filled with amber liquid—brandy. A cork stoppered one end of the tube, a narrow silver sipping cup screwed to the other. Thraxton yanked the cork from the tube while the sexton rummaged in the tiny room for a motley collection of drinking vessels: a battered pewter tankard, a dusty Toby jug and a filthy cracked tea cup. (Which, fortunately, the sexton kept for his own use.) Thraxton splashed a jigger of brandy into each and the men chinked drinking vessels and toasted the Queen’s and then each other’s health. Thraxton’s tankard had a dead, metallic taste to it, but the first sip of brandy washed it away and sent a glowing rush through him more warming than the fire.

For a moment, silence prevailed as the three men sipped their liquor and puffed like chimneys. Thraxton was far from recovered from his ordeal, and as lethargy overtook him, he slipped into a philosophic frame of mind. “What say you, sexton? You live among the dead.” Thraxton’s fascination was evident in his voice. “The other night I saw a spirit, a dark wraith gliding between the graves. Have you seen it, too?”

The sexton was an elderly gentleman with bushy gray sideburns whose volume compensated for the sparse wisp of gray hair frizzling his balding head. He was seventy, but spry for his age and now, at Thraxton’s question, mischief sparkled in his eye. “Oh, I seen things, gents. All manner of things. These pathways are walked during the nights, sometimes more than in the day.”

“Ghosts moaning and rattling chains?” Algernon quipped, not entirely able to conceal his condescension.

The sexton met his gaze with surprising resolve. “It’s not the dead I’m afraid of, sir, it’s the livin’. That’s why I carry Old Bess on me rounds. No, there’s nothing to fear from ghosts.”

“Why do they walk?” Thraxton asked. “Are they unhappy spirits banished to the earthly plane?”

The sexton removed the cigar from his lips and spat something into the fire that sizzled. “I reckon they walk ’cause they miss what they had when they was alive.”

Thraxton leaned forward slightly in his chair, hanging upon every word. “And what is that?”

“Love,” the sexton said calmly. “It’s the only thing we ever really have to call our own. And no one and nuffink can ever take it away from you, not even death.”

Surprise flashed across Thraxton’s face. He puffed at his cigar for several minutes, mulling over the sexton’s words before speaking again.

“What do you think happens when we die, Algy?” Thraxton asked. “Is there an afterlife? A soul that survives physical death?”

“As a scientist, I’m afraid I would need some form of empirical evidence.”

“Such as what? Place the body upon a scale and weigh it before and after death to determine the weight of the soul?”

Algernon chuckled. “That has been tried already, but yes, I would require some form of tangible proof.”

“Have you ever been in love, sir?” the sexton asked.

“Yes,” Algernon said, pride swelling in his voice. “Yes, I have.”

“Was it real?”

“Oh, it was real all right. Positively. No question.”

“Could you have measured it? Weighed it on a scale?”

“No… well… obviously… no,” Algernon stammered.

“I guess love don’t exist, then, eh?”

Algernon choked on his own words, obviously stymied.

Thraxton laughed. “He’s got you there, Algy.”

As Algernon wrestled for a scientifically reasoned comeback, Thraxton leaned from his chair, knocked the slug of ash from his cigar into the fire, then fell back in his seat.

“Very well then, Geoffrey,” Algernon said, “have you ever witnessed evidence of the supernatural?”

Thraxton thought for a moment, drawing deeply on his cigar and blowing a perfect smoke ring. All three watched it rise, dilating until it burst against the ceiling and dispersed. At first, he spoke slowly, haltingly, as if he were pulling the words from a dark, secret place where they had been long-hidden. “I was still a child when my mother died. For weeks, as I lay in my little bed at night, I would talk to her. And it would seem that I could hear her voice in my head, talking back to me.”

Algernon pursed his lips skeptically and countered, “Grief makes us imagine strange things, Geoffrey.”

“That’s what my father said. When I told him of hearing my mother’s voice, I was strapped. To make me stronger. To make me a man. After a number of these strappings, I no longer heard her voice. Although, even after all these years, I have never stopped listening for it.”

As he spoke of his mother, Thraxton’s lips quivered, as if from the pain of an old and deep wound being probed. Algernon noticed the change, as the cynical, often callous man he knew melted away. His face seemed suddenly young—the face of a child who had become lost in a forest and who never found his way home.

“I’ve known you all these years,” Algernon said. “Yet I have never heard you speak of your mother.”

For a moment Thraxton’s eyes betrayed his reluctance to go on such a journey, but he began to speak again, and once started, it was impossible to stop him. “My mother was an angel,” he said, then laughed scornfully at his own pronouncement. “I know every man thinks that. But for my mother it was true, for she never seemed a part of the real world. She was a sickly woman—frail and fragile. In most of my memories she is in her sick bed. She had never been strong. As a child she nearly died from rheumatic fever. It weakened her heart. Giving birth to me overstrained her already delicate disposition. Mother never fully recovered her strength. I suppose that means I am responsible for her death. At least, my father always felt that way, and never failed to remind me of it. Mostly, though, he simply ignored me, which, perhaps, was worse.”

The fire popped and shot a fiery ember that landed on the hearth rug, scorching yet another burn mark. Thraxton sipped his brandy and continued. “When I was not at my studies, I would be permitted to visit my mother in her rooms. She was a very beautiful lady. I remember combing the long auburn hair that reached almost to her waist. She had a pale complexion, translucent as alabaster; no doubt because she rarely went outside and so her skin never suffered the harsh rays of the sun…”

He paused and puffed at his cigar.

“We would play games or she would read to me. But my favorite thing was when she wound me in her arms and we lay together, my back pressed to her chest, her arms wrapped tight as she rocked me. I remember the warmth of her body, her breath on my neck. I remember feeling her heart beating close to mine, the resonance of her chest as she sang to me. I think I shall never know moments of happiness as great as those. Since then I have learned the terrible truth—all love leads to the cemetery. And the greater the love the deeper the loss. That is why I shall never love again.”