Hide Me Among the Graves

"I've got business, horses to see," said Crawford, standing on the gritty curved surface of the ancient turret wall and staring longingly up at the patch of moonlight. "I'm afraid I won't be - "

"This woman can help us save Johanna," McKee interrupted, "if anybody can. She knows about these things."

"Another of your - your Hail Mary artists?"

"No - she's a poet, actually - though not the sort to have been at that salon tonight. And she's a sister at the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women ... which happens to be right near Highgate Cemetery. Her name is Christina Rossetti."

Crawford had never heard of her.

"After my surgery hours, then," he said. "Noon, say." He was still staring up at the moonlight. "Portugal Street? Near St. Clement's?"

"Near enough. Within the origo lemurum incantation."

"What's that mean?" he asked. He was squinting at the slope ahead and bracing himself for the last bit of climbing. "You said it, earlier."

"You've got to placate the old ... gods or devils or whatever they are, who are confined down here. Protocol. Origo lemurum is Latin for something like 'maker of ghosts,' I'm told. You remember it by 'oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's.' The old rhyme gives invocations for other ways down too, near other churches."

Churches, thought Crawford bitterly. No wonder I stay away from them.

McKee waved at the muddy slope that led up to the street. "You go first; I'll follow in a couple of minutes. And I'll be at your door at noon tomorrow."

Crawford was already wondering when he might conveniently get his coat and hat back from the Spotted Dog, but he asked, "You'll be safe here? By yourself?"

He saw her exhausted smile. "Quite safe, thank you for asking."

He hesitated, suddenly reluctant to leave her. "That watch was seven years old," he remarked. "I bought it after ruining my last one when we dove into the river."

She shrugged. "I owe you a lot of time."

He smiled, then turned away and plodded to the embankment; it was in shadow, but it wasn't steep, and the timbers and masonry of buried and long-forgotten buildings made climbing easy enough. Within minutes he had clambered up out of a coal chute in a street he didn't recognize - men were smoking clay pipes on a set of steps nearby, but none of them appeared to see anything odd about Crawford's entrance into the scene - and after he had walked randomly through several sharply turning streets, he found himself at the broad lanes of the Strand, facing the spire of St. Clement Danes.

And this is where you started this morning, he thought bewilderedly, turning his weary steps toward home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I will keep my soul in a place out of sight,

Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

- Algernon Swinburne, "The Triumph of Time"

CHRISTINA LOOKED AWAY from her gentleman caller, who sat on the sofa a few yards away across the carpet, but her wandering gaze happened to fall on her mother's treasured portrait of Uncle John Polidori on the wall over the slant-front desk, and so she reluctantly looked back at Charles Cayley, who was leaning forward earnestly.

"They're so..." he began.

Seconds ticked by on the old clock on the mantel. Christina remembered her father winding that clock every Sunday, in their old house in Charlotte Street.

She sighed, catching a whiff of Cayley's liberally applied cologne. The tea was getting cold in the pot, and Cayley had eaten all the digestive biscuits. Perhaps his stomach was out of order.

She recalled that she and Cayley had been talking about his recent translation of the Psalms. He had published it at his own expense, and the Rossetti family had charitably subscribed for a dozen copies.

"... savage!" he finished at last.

"True," she agreed. "God was raising the Jews by steps from barbarism to a state in which they could receive His son, and they were still genuine barbarians, in those early steps."

"But to ask a blessing! - in the otherwise sublime 137th Psalm - on anyone who would knock the brains out of a Babylonian infant! I don't - "

He was off in a pause again. Sunlight outside made the lace curtains glow behind Cayley, and all Christina could clearly see of him was his balding head and his ears and the edges of his beard, but she knew he would be faintly, awkwardly, smiling.

Christina's mother was pottering about in the kitchen and would not interrupt what she saw as, what might in fact be, a courtship. But Maria would, mercifully, be home soon.

Christina poured out the last of the tea in the pot into Cayley's cup, and she was about to use the emptied pot as an excuse to join her mother for a few moments in the kitchen when three clanks on the front door knocker made both her and Cayley jump.

Lillibet the housekeeper would answer the door in a few moments, but Christina stood up to answer it herself, glad of the opportunity. "Excuse me a moment, Charles."

She hurried to the hall, and paused to look in the mirror between two potted geraniums to make sure her hair was not pushed up in the back from slouching in her chair. Maria would not have knocked.

When Christina pulled open the front door, squinting in the sunlight and the winter breeze, she smiled at the respectably dressed man and woman who stood on the doorstep. They were probably students from Maria's Sunday Bible class, come to ask a question or return a book.

Then the woman pushed the bonnet back from her brown hair, and Christina recognized her.

"Adelaide!" she exclaimed wonderingly.

Cayley, always socially inept, had shuffled up behind her, his old-fashioned tailcoat flapping in the chilly draft.

"Adelaide Procter?" he asked brightly.

Cayley evidently supposed this was the devoutly Christian poetess who did volunteer work for homeless women and children in Bishopsgate.

"Hardly," laughed Christina without thinking, distracted by the uncomfortable sunlight. Then, embarrassed, she smiled and said, "Won't you come in, Adelaide? And - ?"

"This is John Crawford," said Adelaide McKee, stepping into the hall and unbuttoning her coat. "You remember I had a daughter? John is the father."

Christina suppressed a frown - at the Magdalen Penitentiary the reformed prostitutes were told that they must not reestablish contact with characters from their degraded pasts, and this was certainly a violation of that rule. And Christina recalled now that McKee had never agreed to leave London either.

But in the heat of embarrassment, Christina had already invited them in. And she could hardly ask poor Cayley to leave.

She introduced the company to one another, and Cayley was blushing behind his beard, and his nervous smile was broad. Clearly he had gathered that this couple was not married.

"Do join us in the parlor," Christina went on bravely. "I was just about to have a fresh pot of tea brought in."

For a moment she thought McKee had tittered at the remark, and she dreaded an uncomfortable conversation, then realized that McKee had a bird in her handbag.

That, at least, was a good sign. "Keeping the Hail Mary dealers busy?" Christina said.

"I am one now," said McKee. "With, in fact," she added, glancing toward her dubious companion, "a tall order at the moment."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Christina sincerely. "Honest work, lots of fresh air." She led the company back into the parlor, and when all three of her guests were seated and blinking uneasily at one another, she leaned through the kitchen door.

"Visitors from the Magdalen," she told her mother. "Could you ask Lillibet to bring us another pot?"

She sat down beside Cayley and gazed frankly at Adelaide's companion. Mr. Crawford didn't look depraved, sitting beside her with his bowler hat in his lap - his dark brown hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he had the air of a professional man, or a scholar, caught in embarrassing circumstances.

"What do you do, Mr. Crawford?" she asked.

The man shifted uneasily. "I'm a veterinary surgeon, Miss Rossetti - a horse doctor. I have a surgery in Wych Street."

Emboldened by this sally, Cayley turned his nervous smile on Adelaide and said, "Hail Mary dealers?" The presence of strangers made Christina aware again of how high pitched his voice was. "Are you a Roman Catholic, Miss McKee?"

Christina knew that Cayley didn't think much of Catholics. "It's slang for dealers in live songbirds," she said, and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. "Ave, from avis, in Latin - calls to mind Ave Maria - hence Hail Mary. The big markets for them are in Hare Street and Brick Lane."

"And no, I'm not Catholic," said McKee. "Their standards are too high." She faced Christina. "I'm sorry to burst in on you this way, but our daughter - well, you remember I thought she was dead? We have it from a reliable source that she's alive after all. Possibly living around Highgate."

"Oh, that's wonderful!" exclaimed Christina. "Can you find out exactly where she's living? Could your 'reliable source' help?"

"Unhappily not." She glanced toward Cayley, then back at Christina, and shrugged. "It was the old bawd Carpace, and she was a ghost when she told us as much as she did. And now she's - " McKee made a diving gesture.

"Ah." Christina nodded. "In the river with the rest of them."

Mr. Crawford seemed surprised that Christina knew of such things.

Charles Cayley raised a hand, and Christina turned to him.

"Is - there more tea coming?" he asked.

"Yes, in a moment. Charles, this - "

"Spiritualism?" he said. "I assume? Christina, by the affection which I may be so bold as to say I hold for you - ah - "

McKee caught Christina's eye and raised her eyebrows.

" - I have to remind you," Cayley went on, and then he paused.

After a few seconds, McKee said, "Miss Rossetti, I apologize. John and I shouldn't have interrupted. We can come back - "

"No, no," said Cayley, "it's I who should be - "

The front door latch rattled then, and heavy boots thumped on the hallway carpet.

That must be Gabriel, Christina thought. Maria would have been better.

And a moment later Gabriel appeared in the doorway, tossing aside a broad-brimmed hat and unwinding a straw-colored scarf from around his neck and looking more dissipated than ever - his dark hair was falling down in oily curls over his forehead, his eyes looked pouchy and sunken, and his cheeks around his goatee were bristly.

He cast an incurious glance over Christina's guests, then said to her, "I'm thinking of fetching in a priest, a Catholic one. They're the lads for exorcisms."

"A priest," said Christina, flustered, "might throw out the baby with the baptismal water. Oh dear, this is all so - "

"She's alive, at least," Gabriel went on. "At the moment. She even wants to go out to dinner tonight. But if we can't detach the devil's hooks - "

McKee had stood up, and Gabriel frowned at her.

McKee said, "Excuse me. But - could you - push your hair back?"

Gabriel opened his mouth, then shut it. "No," he said finally.

"No," said McKee, "you don't have to, I know your voice too. I never forget a client. You're the man who advised me to enroll at the Magdalen Penitentiary, one night seven years ago. It was in Mayfair, do you remember? You said the priests and sisters at Magdalen could help me ... undo the bad connections I'd made."

"Oh, Gabriel," said Christina reproachfully. "Mayfair? The Argyle Rooms, the Alhambra? Kate Hamilton's on Prince's Street?"

"No," put in McKee, "I was trolling under Carpace's colors."

Christina turned to McKee. "North of the river in a borrowed dress? She must have trusted you, to let you wander so far from Griffin Street."

Both Cayley and the Crawford fellow were looking from one speaker to the other in evident dismay.

"My young daughter," said McKee, "is in the same peril as this woman you're referring to, I believe. We're talking about the Nephilim? 'The giants that were in the earth in those days'? I agree with Sister Christina about the perils of calling in a priest."

Gabriel was squinting at her. "Daughter?" he asked hollowly.

"By this man," said McKee, waving toward Crawford. "Put your mind at ease - about that, at least."

Crawford was still sitting on the sofa, and he and Gabriel exchanged an embarrassed and unfriendly glance.

The Rossettis' housekeeper bustled in then with a tray on which sat a teapot and four cups.

"Mr. Gabriel!" she said. "I'll fetch another cup." She set the tray down and returned to the kitchen.

"Never mind, Lillibet," Christina called after her. "Charles, I must beg your forgiveness here, I - "

"Yes," said Cayley, getting to his feet. "We can talk another time." His face was red, and his bald scalp was gleaming. "I fear that your volunteer work among the lower - excuse me - among the unfortunate, has - has - "

"Lower - ?" began Crawford, getting to his feet; Christina sent him an imploring glance, and he sat down again, grumbling.

Gabriel laughed, and it pained Christina to see her youthful brother for a moment in that prematurely sagging face.

"If you will all forgive me," said Cayley in his piping voice, "it's been a - I certainly never meant to - but I'm afraid I must - " He bowed and scuttled out of the room.

Nobody spoke until they heard the front door click shut and the knock of boots descending the front steps.