Hide Me Among the Graves (3 page)

Her father claimed it had given him a prophetic vision of her mother.

She tucked it under her pillow and pulled the bed curtain closed again, and she lay down and snuggled herself under the blankets, hopeful that she had banished the old nightmares and would instead dream of the man she would one day marry.

AT FIRST THE FIGURE
seemed to be Mouth Boy after all, for the thing's lips were grossly swollen, as if from an injury—in the dream it limped from darkness into the ring of light below a streetlamp—but when she focused more closely, she saw that the effect must have been a momentary exaggeration of the shadows, for its lips were simply wide and prominent below a pug nose and two enormous eyes. Its hair was an untidy tangle, and somehow it seemed to bear a caricature resemblance to her brother Gabriel.

This wasn't the Mouth Boy phantasm, which always looked more like a wide-snouted crocodile with no eyes at all.

This figure in the street waved both arms upward, and she saw that its coat sleeves hung over its hands, and from the steamy puffing of its breath it seemed to be speaking rhythmically, or singing, though she couldn't hear any sound.

It was standing at the steps of a house, and in a moment Christina recognized the house in the dream—it was her own house, her own front door at the top of the steps.

The flabby white cheeks glistened, as if this thing that resembled her brother were weeping at being locked outside.

“Wait,” she said, and she realized that she had sat up in bed and was awake, and speaking out loud in the close darkness. “I'll let you in.”

Her heart was pounding and her pulse thudded in her temples, and she wasn't able to take a deep breath, but she stepped out of bed straight toward the bedroom door, letting the curtain slide over her head till the hem of it fell off behind her like a discarded shawl, and she opened the door and stole down the stairs to the street door.

That September the summer twilight still extended past supper and the hour for the Read girls to go to bed, and so Maria and her visiting sister were permitted to take horses from the stable and ride as far as the family chapel and back.

The rosemary-scented breeze fluttered the girls' skirts as they rode slowly along the dirt path between the shadow-streaked grassy hills. Maria wore a long black riding habit loaned to her by Mrs. Read, and in spite of her stoutness she rode comfortably sidesaddle on a chestnut mare, but Christina, though she was riding more securely astride a man's saddle, was terrified whenever her gray gelding broke into a trot.

“He's a gentle old thing,” Maria called to her. “You can simply relax and move with him.”

“I feel like a tennis ball,” said Christina breathlessly, “being bounced up and down on a racket. One time I'll—miss the racket when I come down, and I—
don't see any
way to fall off which doesn't—involve landing on my head.” She smiled, but her face was misted with sweat and she felt as though her teeth might at any moment start chattering.

Maria reined in her own mount so that Christina's would subside to a steady walk.

“You'll be returning to London with a much rosier complexion than you left with,” Maria observed. “Sun and fresh air have done it.”

“Possibly.” Christina knew that she had not regained any weight during this week in the country at the house of Maria's employers, and on the few occasions when she had ventured out into the sunlight she had been wearing a hat. Her forehead was always damp with perspiration. “I certainly like your cure better than iron filings steeped in beer.”

“You don't swallow the iron filings, do you? Is that a cure for angina pectoris?”

“For anemia, actually. No, they decant the beer off them.”

Maria was looking at her, but Christina couldn't make out the expression on her sister's round face against the glowing western sky. Perhaps she was disapproving of anyone giving quantities of beer to a fourteen-year-old girl, even as medicine.

“You must be a very good teacher,” Christina said quickly, “to be a live-in governess for such a well-to-do family.”

“They rejected another girl,” said Maria, “because Mrs. Read felt she was too pretty to be in the house with Mr. Read. I'm employed because I'm not comely. I'd like to have the girls learn Greek and Latin, but I'm only to teach them from the
Historical and Miscellaneous Questions
—from it they learn things like, oh, when the Diet of Worms occurred, but not a bit of what it was.”

“They must wonder what other diets were tried before it,” said Christina, smiling. “The Diet of Dirt, the Diet of—”

“Anemia,” Maria interrupted flatly, “angina pectoris, palpitations, shortness of breath.” They were in the long shadow of a western hill now, and the northern breeze from the Chiltern Hills was cooler. “What is it?”

“Doctor Latham says that puberty is often—”

“Not what Doctor Latham says it is. What do
you
say it is?”

Christina opened her mouth, and then after a moment closed it again. “Oh, Maria,” she whispered finally, “pray for me!”

“I do. And I hope you pray for yourself.”

The dark spire of the Read family chapel was visible now ahead on their left, beyond the tall black cypresses and the iron fence of the family churchyard, and it occurred to Christina that it might not have been entirely the chapel's convenient distance from the house that had led Maria to choose it as their goal.

“I try to pray,” she said. “I can't go to Confession anymore.” She spread the fingers of one hand without releasing the rein. “What would I—
say
?”

Maria's voice was gentle. “Say it to me.”

“I—Maria, I think—I'm ruined!”

Maria rocked back in her saddle, and her mare clopped to a halt. “Ach, 'Stina!” Maria whispered. “You
think
so? Are you—to be sent away?”

“I don't know. Can ghosts father children?”

Her horse had stopped too, and she could see the silhouette of Maria's head shaking slowly.

“It was a ghost?” asked Maria.

Christina nodded.

“I want to understand. You're saying it was the spirit of a dead man.”

“Yes.”

“If you've been feverish—”

“Maria, I didn't
dream
it! Well, I did at first—I saw it outside the house, but then I woke up and went downstairs and let it in—”

“Why on earth would you let it
in
?”

“It was in already, really—its body, in any case, petrified. Aren't ghosts supposed to sit by their graves? And it was sick, and weeping, and looked like Gabriel! And you and William too. It looked like family—I felt as if I were letting it back into its own house.
And
I—oh, I thought it would show me visions of my future spouse, guide me there, as it did for Papa.”

Maria glanced at her. “Really? I never knew.”

Christina just shook her head, biting her lip.

“Er …
did
it? Show you a vision of that?”

“No. It only showed me itself.”

For a few moments there was no sound but the wind that shook the grasses and tossed stray strands of Christina's fair hair across her face.

At last Maria said, “Was it … substantial, your ghost?” She waved one hand. “Did it have weight, did the floorboards creak?”

“Weight? Not at first,” said Christina bleakly. “Later, yes. Yes.” She sighed. “As I diminished.”

Maria was deep in thought and absently said, “I don't think anybody would say a
ghost
can ruin a girl.” She looked up. “I thought Papa—”

“But
I
know.” Christina's face was damp and chilly as she made herself speak. “Oh God. It wasn't—he, it, didn't
force
itself on me.”

After a pause, Maria nudged her horse into a walk with her left heel, and Christina's moved forward to keep pace.

Maria said, “I thought Papa kept that damned thing on a special shelf in his room.” She looked at Christina and shrugged. “Of course I know. What other ghost could it be?”

“Oh. Yes. Papa was keeping it in the pocket of his robe, lately. He thought it helped his vision. But then he gave it to me, three months ago.”

“And where—” Maria's head whipped around to face Christina. “Jesus save us! You didn't bring it
here,
did you?”

“I'm sorry! I thought you'd know how to … make it stop, free his soul from the statue, lay him to final rest! You've read so many—”

Maria's eyes darted over Christina's long coat and bunched-up skirt. “Do you have it with you
now
?”

Christina nodded miserably. “I carry it around with me, very close. Not that it does me any good.”

“I cannot believe you had it in the house with Lucy and Bessie!” Maria peered at the open gate of the cypress-shadowed churchyard, only a dozen yards ahead now along the rutted dirt path. “We could bury it in consecrated ground.”

“I don't think it would lie … inertly, in peace. And Papa entrusted it to me—I know he'll want it back, sooner or later. Oh, Maria, I don't want to hate him for this!”

“Hate which?”

Christina blinked at her sister, then answered softly, “Well—either of them.”

“You say he led Papa to our mother.” Maria's voice was flat. “And he resembled Gabriel and William and me. And Mama and you too, I imagine. I think I know who your ghost must be.” She shook her head. “Have
been.
And you—you're
fond
of him.”

“I—try not to be. I do want to send him away.”

“Exorcise him? To Hell? That's where he belongs—he committed suicide, remember, in 1821.”

“No—I know, but Mama—”

“He's what's made you sick. Does he keep you from eating, sleeping, to make you so pale and thin?”

“No,” said Christina. She laughed briefly, a sound like dry sticks knocked together. “He's more like a—a bedbug.”

“He, what, he
bites
you?”

“It doesn't hurt. It did at first, but now it—doesn't hurt.”

The horses had rocked and plodded up to the arched wrought-iron gate of the churchyard, and Maria unhooked her right leg from the fixed saddle pommel and slid down to thump her boots on the dusty ground.

“We might be able do something here,” she said.

Christina, up on her own conventional saddle, hadn't shifted. “Maria, you've read, oh, Homer and Euripides and Ovid! I don't want to exorcise him to Hell. Isn't there some
pagan
ritual we could do?”

“We're Christians, and this is a Christian church; I don't—”

“Mama loves him still! He's her brother! What if it were a brother of yours—Gabriel or William?”

“Any such ‘ritual' would … compromise our
souls,
Christina, yours and mine.” She squinted up at her sister. “Our Savior mercifully put an end—and an interdict!—to the old pagan tricks.”

“Can we at least give him some sort of pagan burial, so he might dissipate into the dirt and the grass? Then tomorrow I could dig him—it—up again, once the spirit was gone, and take the emptied statue back to Papa.”

“Christina, this is a job for a priest, not two girls! A
Catholic
priest, really—they're more familiar with devils.”

“I
won't
send him to Hell. I'll let him drain me to a husk, sooner.” She shuddered and hugged herself with her thin arms. “I'm glad he didn't do this to Papa. But, Maria, why
didn't
he do this to Papa, who found him and woke him?”

“Papa married into the Polidori family; he's not a blood relation. You are. Do you need help getting down?”

After a moment of puzzlement, Christina shook her head and pulled her right foot free of the stirrup, and when she swung her leg over the horse's back, Maria caught her by the waist and steadied her to the ground.

“You don't weigh anything,” said Maria, brushing her sister's skirt out straight.

Christina took a hasty step to catch her balance and said, breathlessly, “Help me down—from this precipice!—Maria.”

For several seconds neither girl spoke, and Christina's panting gradually subsided.

“Can he hear us?” asked Maria finally. “Now?”