Hide Me Among the Graves (50 page)

Last night the three of them had slept in the basement, in shifts, with mirrors, silver, garlic, and iron knives ready to hand, and he was anxious to get to Newhaven, where British tourists commonly took a boat across the English Channel to Dieppe.

But this errand was important.

“A church, around here?” he asked now as they stepped up the curb in front of a long five-story building that narrowed Tottenham Court Road. He wasn't aware of any church very close by here—the only vaguely communal institution he knew of locally was the Oxford Music Hall under the big clock that projected out over the pavement traffic ahead.

But McKee turned to the right before they got that far, into the narrow lane that was Bozier's Court, known as Boozer's Alley because of the public house on the corner.

“Yes,” McKee said, sounding defensive, “a church. Both of you behave yourselves now, we need a big favor from the priest.”

Crawford and Johanna exchanged a mystified look but followed McKee. In the narrow court the rattle and clop of the traffic behind them was muted, and their own footsteps echoed back at them from the close brick walls.

McKee led them to a pair of tall wooden doors under a pointed arch in the tall street-side building, and before pulling one of them open, she dug a couple of lacy handkerchiefs out of her handbag and tied one over her head and gave the other to Johanna.

“And you take off your hat,” she told Crawford.

When they had stepped into the cool dimness and pulled the door closed behind them, Crawford could at first see only the high mottled-gray disk of a stained-glass window in the far wall of the narrow, high-ceilinged room; then after a few moments he saw ranks of glass-dimmed candle flames, and finally he was able to make out rows of pews and an altar at the far end. The cool air carried the scents of old wood and incense. A few huddled figures sat in the pews, and a tall man in a robe was striding down the side aisle on the right.

“Confessions?” the man said in a quiet but carrying voice. “Thursdays aren't generally—why it's Adelaide!” The priest was close enough now for Crawford to see the man's thin, deeply lined face. “I'm sorry—you just looked like a particularly sinful trio.”

Johanna nodded solemnly.
“Are
we here for Confession?” she asked McKee.

“No,” said McKee. “We need a pretty substantial favor.” She pointed at Crawford and herself. “He and I want to get married. Uh, Father Cyprian, this is John Crawford, and this is our daughter, Johanna.”

The priest nodded sympathetically. “One does tend to keep putting these things off, doesn't one? But that's not so substantial—we do weddings with some frequency here.”

“But we want to be married soon—tomorrow or Saturday. There's no time for banns to be posted.”

Father Cyprian raised his eyebrows. “Why the haste?” He glanced at Johanna, as if to note that the child was already, long since, born out of wedlock.

Then he crouched beside her. “Who's been pounding on you, child? Not one of these two, I hope?”

“It happened in a dream,” Johanna told him.

“Oh?” The priest stood up and turned to McKee. “Why the haste?” he asked again.

“We may,” McKee began, then paused and looked up at the beams in the ceiling. “We may all three of us be dead soon, or worse, and—”

“And
we love each other,” said Crawford sturdily, “and we want our daughter to have my name.”

The priest nodded. “Let's start with ‘or worse,'” he said. “What's worse?”

“Do you remember,” McKee asked him, “why I originally came to
this
church, after I got out of the Magdalen Penitentiary?”

Father Cyprian frowned. “Sister Christina sent you, as I recall, yes. Yes.” He squinted at the old tiles of the floor. “There's apparently been some turbulence among the local devils just in this last week—one up, the other down. Your troubles have something to do with that?”

“The newly up one has particular designs on Johanna here,” said McKee.

Johanna nodded and touched her throat. “I used to be one of his. Not all the way to death and resurrection, but …
his
.”

“And he wants her back,” said McKee. “Her more than the others, it seems. We plan to cross the Channel to France in the next couple of days, and travel and lodging and financial arrangements will apparently be easier if we can show that we're legally married.”

“It'd be nice to have the lines,” said Johanna, using the coster term for a marriage certificate.

Father Cyprian nodded thoughtfully, then looked up at McKee. “John here says he loves you. Do you love him?”

“I—wouldn't marry just for expediency.”

“But,” said the priest, “travel plans and legal protocols are what you advanced as your reasons.”

Johanna and Crawford were both looking at McKee.

“Yes, I love him,” she said, exhaling. “I have for seven years.”

“For seven years?” said the priest. “Unfair to that spoons man, in that case, even on a common-law basis … with no ‘lines.' Terry?”

“Tom. Yes, I suppose it was.” McKee leaned against one of the pews and rubbed her forehead. “I should apologize to him, before we go.”

“I wouldn't,” said Father Cyprian. “He's been in here once or twice, looking for you.” This visibly surprised and dismayed McKee. The priest went on, “I would let sleeping mad dogs lie. And I trust,” he added, looking Crawford up and down, “that you've chosen a different sort of man this time.”

“She has, she has,” said Johanna.

Crawford didn't look at her but squeezed her hand.

The priest turned toward the pews that filed away toward the altar. “Christabel!” he called softly.

An old woman halfway up the aisle looked around, then laboriously got to her feet when the priest beckoned and began shuffling toward the back of the church.

“Tomorrow,” said the priest quietly to McKee.

When old Christabel had made her way back to where they stood, Father Cyprian asked her, “Christabel, did you hear it these last three Sundays when I announced the banns for John Crawford and Adelaide McKee?”

“Of course I did,” the old woman wheezed. “I hear everything you say.”

“Do you recall the names?”

“A Crawford, it was, and our dear Adelaide.” She touched McKee's shoulder. “Haven't seen you here this past week or two, my dear. You've not been ill, I trust?”

“No,” said McKee, smiling. “Just … distracted.”

“And is this Mr. Crawford?” Getting a nod, the old woman said to him, “Be good to our girl, Mr. Crawford. It's time somebody did.”

“I will,” said Crawford hoarsely.

Christabel nodded and turned around and began shambling back toward her pew.

Father Cyprian looked after her. “Sister Christina has sent us a lot of parishioners,” he said. Then, to McKee, “Ten in the morning? Not a lot of people in here on a Friday at that hour. Bring fourteen shillings—two are for the banns, I'm afraid, but the receipt is necessary for the certificate.”

McKee smiled. “I'll send out invitations at once.”

“And I,” the priest said, “have to make some corrections in the banns list.”

He shook Crawford's hand and then strode away back toward the altar and the door to the sacristy, and McKee led Crawford and Johanna back out into Bozier's Court.

THAT NIGHT AN ODDLY
warm October breeze shook the bare branches of the oaks and elms in Highgate Cemetery. The fire the gravediggers had kindled next to the grave made a spot of glaring orange light in the moonlit landscape of headstones and waving groves. Far overhead, ragged clouds surged across the spotted face of the moon.

Gabriel had been leaning against a tomb thirty feet away, where he could watch the gravediggers plunge and lever their spades in the loam while the cloaked figure of Charles Howell stood by the fire and stared into the deepening hole; but when one of the men eventually climbed out of the grave and fetched a couple of ropes, Gabriel stepped closer, and when the two gravediggers had hauled the dirt-caked coffin up out of the hole and swung it heavily onto the firelit grass, he edged around behind a thickly vine-hung elm to view the proceedings more closely.

He was viewing the coffin from the foot now, from a distance of only a couple of yards, and so when the men pried up the lid and laid it aside, he found himself looking directly at Lizzie's face by the fire's illumination.

Howell and the gravediggers were momentarily motionless, staring into the coffin, and Gabriel stepped hesitantly forward, out of the shadows, and peered.

Lizzie's face was pale but apparently undecayed, framed in masses of red hair that gleamed in the firelight—much more hair than when he had closed the coffin in the Chatham Place flat seven years ago!

Belatedly it occurred to him that the mirror-veil Maria had made was no longer over Lizzie's face.

Gabriel could see the poetry notebook. He had laid it in on top of her hands at her funeral, but Lizzie's smooth white fingers were curled around the edges of it now, and—he blinked rapidly and stared—her fingernails seemed to have grown too, in the grave, and now indented or even pierced the binding.

Lizzie's body was fresh and undecayed, but the notebook was now stained and warped.

Gabriel choked and blinked back tears, glad that her eyes were closed. He retreated back into the shadows behind the elm tree. The warm wind in the trees seemed to be full of whispering voices.

His view was blocked then as Howell at last leaned in and worked with both hands; Gabriel heard popping and scratching, and whispered curses from Howell, and then the man had straightened up, panting, holding Gabriel's ragged notebook. Howell curtly said something to the gravediggers, dug some banknotes out of his waistcoat pocket—the twenty-two pounds with which Gabriel had provided him—and handed it to them and then strode away quickly through the sparse red-lit grass toward the lane and the stairs. Gabriel stepped back as he passed, deeper into the shadows.

The two gravediggers were refastening the lid onto Lizzie's coffin when Gabriel heard Howell's carriage snap and clatter into motion, and he stepped forward into the firelight.

One of the gravediggers looked up at him from under a battered tweed cap. “You weren't along to help, I reckon.”

“No,” Gabriel agreed. “I came along to pay you to take a rest now, down in your carriage.” He dug six gold sovereigns from the pocket of his Inverness cape and gave three to each man. “I'll call you when the rest period is finished.”

The men blinked in surprise, and then one of them said, “Take your time, guv'nor!” and they ambled away across the grass toward the stairs.

Gabriel waited until he heard their steps on the gravel lane below the stairs, then crossed to the open grave and stared down into it as he pulled on a pair of gloves.

In the deep shadows he could see a few patches of wood showing under the scuffed dirt, and he sighed and sat down on the edge with his feet swinging in the hole.

I can drop down, he thought, and avoid putting my feet through Papa's coffin, but can I get out again? Will I have to call those two back to help me?

Oh well, I've paid them enough to provide that service too.

He pushed off and landed with a thump, his boots straddling the long mound that was his father's coffin. Quickly he reversed his feet and then crouched, tugging the hammer and chisel from his belt.

He set the chisel blade crossways to the grain of the wood and swung the hammer. There was enough dirt still on the coffin to mask the shape of it, and he hoped he was not about to see his father's feet.

The clang of steel on steel seemed awfully loud, but he supposed the noise was muffled somewhat by the walls of dirt; and after a dozen blows he was able to drop the tools and reach down to pull up a splintered section of still-glossy oak. He wrinkled his nose at a smell like toasted cheese made with a very old, metallic-tasting blue cheese.

He tore the section of wood away, and then by the reflected light of the fire on the grass above he was staring down at his father's collapsed and withered face, black as coal.

His only emotion was intense anxiety to get this over with, and he supposed that he would feel guilt and horror later, at his leisure.

Gabriel pulled the penknife out of his pocket and opened the long blade, but when he pushed his father's cold chin back, the whole neck simply broke, like a roll of frail glass sheets. He brushed thin black shards off his gloves. His hands were visibly shaking now.

He tapped the base of his father's throat with the back end of the knife, and it clinked, steel on black glass.

Whispering shrilly and not even listening to what he was saying, prayers or curses or the multiplication table, he put the knife away and picked up the hammer again—and then he rapped his father's throat smartly with the head of it.