Hide Me Among the Graves (21 page)

“Yes? What word?” said Gabriel. He seemed distracted.

“Rosetta,” said Trelawny impatiently. “I just said it. The stone, you know? I'm the Rosetta stone in this—I make translation between the two species possible.”

“It could be cut out,” said Crawford.

“And pulverized and scattered in the sea!” added Christina.

“You're a good girl,” said Trelawny, smiling crookedly at her. “But it's in under the jugular vein, and I haven't yet met a medical man I'd trust to cut it out.” He shrugged deprecatingly. “And, to be honest, it gives me a certain immunity, with them.”

“You,” said Gabriel, “what, accept their amnesty?”

Trelawny gave him a scornful look from under his bushy white eyebrows. “I
use
it, sonny. I've been
making amends
for things I did in Greece, in Euboea and on Mount Parnassus, forty years ago.” Trelawny's scarred lips gave him an expression that was only humorously rueful.

Gabriel and Christina glanced at each other, and Gabriel mouthed the word
Parnassus.

“The Italian Carbonari pursue efforts similar to mine,” said Trelawny, “but I'm not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.” He glanced at Crawford, which Crawford thought was unfair. “I get things done by myself,” Trelawny went on. “Your old woman, Carpace or Carpaccio, she hoped to introduce another of these vampires to that sad crowd of poets last night.” He laughed. “But a boat carrying a statue from Greece happened to explode on the river yesterday morning, and so Madame Carpaccio's vitreous guest of honor is now on the river bottom. And I maintain a small army of spies—” He paused and laughed again, but to Crawford it seemed forced now, and the old man squinted around at his companions as if regretting his momentary openness. “I try to work them ill in many ways,” he said gruffly, “when Miss B. isn't looking.” He tapped the sand with his boot toe. “And by now she's probably burrowed right down into the sewers.”

“I'm glad we didn't meet her last night,” said Crawford to McKee.

“What are you talking about,” snapped Trelawny, “you
did
meet her last night. Who the hell do you think that tall woman with me was? As I recall, she nearly lapped up
your
sorry soul like a cat with a bowl of milk.”

Christina stepped forward and touched Trelawny's sleeve. “And how is it that she has come to be attached to you, Mr. Samson?”

“Attached to me. Yes. Damn it, I returned to England
clean,
in 1834, after a voyage across the whole Atlantic Ocean, to America, where I baptized myself by swimming the Niagara River, though it nearly killed me to do it—when I really thought I was drowning, I could feel the devil claws pulling out of me, reluctantly! I was as clean as a newborn babe—”

“Except for the half statue in your neck,” said Gabriel.

Trelawny scowled at him, then grinned around the cigar in his teeth. “Well, yes, sonny, except for that. But it hadn't started growing yet, you see. Probably wouldn't have. In any case, I became a responsible citizen here, wasted my time with politics, went to a lot of foolish dinners. Scandalized society by not wearing stockings. But there were still people about the place who remembered the old Neffy days, and they could recognize the—the
look,
on me. So I took me a wife and built a house on the cliff at Llanbadoc Rock, in Monmouthshire in eastern Wales. Lived there happily for ten years, had three more children, planted a row of cedars from cones I brought from the poet Shelley's grave in Rome. And I happen to have a piece of Shelley's jawbone—he was a half-breed member of their tribe by birth, and relics of him tend to deflect or refract their attention—”

“You're Shelley's famous friend, you're Edward John Trelawny,” said Christina suddenly, and then she covered her mouth.

“Bad luck for me that you know it,” said Trelawny. He frowned and rubbed his eyes with a spotted old hand. “Don't tell me who you are.”

“Oh, you wouldn't have heard
of me,”
said Christina.

Trelawny dropped his hand and glared at her. “Damn it, now I know you're an aspiring poet. Will you
not
speak, please?” His craggy face above the white beard was fierce, his blue eyes glittering. “At any rate!—being remote from London, and with Shelley's jawbone to keep the devils from seeing me, I relaxed. And five years ago I went exploring up the river Severn; and eventually I rowed right up the Birmingham and Worcester Canal and—”

“You
rowed
up the Severn?” interrupted Gabriel.

“Byron once swam from Sestos to Abydos,” Trelawny said irritably, “and even in my forties I was in better condition than he ever was. The stories I could tell you about him!”

“Up the canal,” prompted McKee.

“Indeed. Well, I could have rowed on to Birmingham, easily, but I went ashore for the night in a little village called King's Norton. Means ‘the king's northern settlement' originally. And I couldn't sleep—I could feel someone calling me, in the old melody—so I went for a walk.”

“I know that melody,” said Christina softly.

Trelawny gave her a relenting, sympathetic look. “I'm afraid your poetry is probably very good, my dear. That's one of their gifts. Byron was a member of the tribe too.”

To Crawford's alarm, Christina seemed to conceal satisfaction at the remark. But, “You should have gone to a church,” she said.

“Stop it,” said Trelawny mildly. “King's Norton lies on what they call Watling Street, the old Roman road that cuts right across Britain. I walked out of the village by moonlight, and out in the fields among the old oak trees I found stones, rounded now by weather but clearly cut by man many centuries ago, and then I was in a narrow defile, and—I met,” he said, nodding toward Crawford and McKee, “the woman you saw me with last night. Her husband had died, leaving his lands to her and her daughters, but the Romans annexed them, and flogged her and raped her daughters—”

“The Romans did?” asked Crawford.

“This was a ghost,” Gabriel told him shortly.

“Aye, a ghost,” said Trelawny, “to the extent that a figurehead is a ship. And so in revenge she led the Iceni and the Trinovantes against the Roman settlement at Colchester, and they damn well leveled the place. Then she led her barbarian army to London, and the Romans simply ran, so she leveled it too, with the help of an accommodating earthquake.”

“My God.” Christina was pale, and she nodded. “I know
her
name too.”

“She told you all this, there?” said Gabriel.

“She was boasting, boy,” said Trelawny softly. “Trying to appear substantial. Ghosts are ashamed of being dead.”

The cage they were in was west of the zoo wall, and Christina looked out across the grass to the south, toward where the creature had burrowed into the ground, and shook her head unhappily.

“She had sold her soul to get revenge,” Trelawny went on, “to a goddess she called Andraste, which was also called Magna Mater, and Goemagot or Gogmagog.”

Christina gripped Gabriel's arm; she started to whisper something to him, then shut her mouth and just shook her head.

Trelawny raised an eyebrow. “We're all in the soup, I perceive. Well, the emperor Nero was ready to abandon Britain altogether, but the Roman troops under Suetonius finally caught her on Watling Street, in the very defile I had wandered into. And her army was destroyed, and she drank poison.”

“So did Polidori,” said Gabriel.

“The last sacrament to the goddess,” said Trelawny, nodding. “But by that time she had of course been
bitten
by the stony goddess, and so she was not permitted to lie quiet in the earth. She—came home with me.”

“You invited her in,” said Christina.

“I couldn't just—
leave
her out there!—somehow. By daylight she's—well, you saw her: dwarfish, imbecilic, has to be covered against the sun. Can't speak, has to wring notes out of that violin, with her hands in quilted mitts or hidden in long sleeves. When we arrived at my house, this was five years ago, I had to carry her up the hill, near bursting my heart with the effort of it. While she's ‘alive' she always weighs the same, regardless of her volume. I told my wife she was a long-lost daughter of mine, and she lived with us, even when we moved to a nearby estate, Cefn Ila. I took precautions, you understand, even though I had Shelley's jawbone—garlic and mirrors and wood and silver—she was never free to consummate a link with me or any of my family.
But
—”

He exhaled a cloud of steam and cigar smoke. “My wife was no fool. To make sure of protecting our children, she left me, and I returned to London … with my inextricable companion, Miss B.”

“Boadicea, queen of the Iceni,” said Christina softly. “Was it about
A.D.
60 that she … died?”

Crawford tried unsuccessfully to catch McKee's eye. We saw some of Boadicea's ancient havoc last night, he thought.

“You're a scholar, Miss Diamonds. And she would dearly love to destroy London again.”

“I'm—embarrassed,” Christina said, “to have seen her like”—she waved out toward the park—“like that.”

Crawford looked out across the desolate park. One solitary walker wearing a very broad-brimmed hat was plodding west among the elm trees on this side of the frozen boating lake, the laboring silhouette merging and separating from the vertical lines of the black tree trunks.

“She's far more dangerous now,” Trelawny told Christina, “than she was when she was entirely human.” He turned to McKee. “You had an ave with you last night. Did it catch Carpace's ghost?”

“Y-yes,” said McKee, “and I went to Chichuwee, as you advised; and I got an answer—”

Trelawny interrupted urgently: “Do you still have the ave?”

“The ghost isn't still in it,” she said. “I had got my answer, so—”

“You
dumped
her?” he asked incredulously. “Into the river?”

McKee bit her lip and nodded.

And broke a promise in order to do it, thought Crawford. For revenge.

“Didn't you—” began Trelawny; he took a breath and went on, “She'll never
willingly
answer questions, with a planchette and pencil! Didn't it
occur
to you that she knows—knew!—important things about the Nephilim, things that might help save your—what was it, daughter?”

“She told me where to look for her…”

“And she said that the living Polidori statue is in Highgate Cemetery!” burst out Christina. “We can trust Trelawny!” she insisted to her brother, who had grimaced fiercely at her.

“Certainly,” agreed Gabriel through his teeth. “He's only got a similar statue
in his damned neck.”

“Not precisely
similar,”
said Trelawny. “But you can trust my ignorance. I don't know who any of you are, nor where you live. Let's maintain that lack of acquaintance; a good social policy in general, probably.” He tossed his cigar cleanly between two of the bars onto the snowy gravel lane. “Highgate Cemetery. She might be breakable through Polidori.” He fixed a glare on Christina. “How was he quickened?”

Christina turned away so that all any of them could see was the side of her bonnet. “I, God help me, I rubbed some of my blood on the statue—and then slept with it under my pillow.”

“She was only fourteen!” Gabriel burst out.

For a moment Trelawny just smiled gently at her. At last, “A prodigy!” he said. He took his violin case from the shelf and stepped to the cage gate and pulled it open. “I hope you all fare better than you seem likely to do,” he said when he was standing in sunlight out on the gravel. “Never speak to me again. Muster what wits you have, and exert them.”

“And pray to God for deliverance,” said Christina.

Trelawny gave her a withering smile with his scarred mouth. “I like you, Miss Diamonds, so I won't call you a fool.” He bowed and turned away, and within moments his long stride had carried him out of the zoo lanes to the west, and soon he was a dwindling figure on the yellow grass, angling north toward the canal.

Crawford looked away from him, to the south, and saw that the person in the broad hat he had seen walking among the trees was, though still fifty yards away, now slowly trudging north, toward the broad lane of the outer circle. If he crossed that, he'd be in among the empty cassowary and zebra cages and could hardly fail to notice the cage on the end that was occupied by four humans.

We should get out of this, Crawford thought in embarrassment, onto the lane, like normal people.

“So that's the infamous Trelawny,” said Gabriel, still staring west. “Arrogant ass.”

“If you two were
men
,” McKee burst out, “you'd have overpowered him and cut that stone ball out of his neck right here!”

Crawford blinked at her irritably, then forced himself to smile. “Well, I
meant
to,” he said, “but the appropriate moment never presented itself.”