Hide Me Among the Graves (8 page)

“Our daughter.”

“Our daughter, since her death?”

McKee opened her mouth—then closed it and shook her head, scowling. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I shouldn't have got—it was unreasonable of me to get angry. I'm glad your wife and younger son are apparently resting in peace. No, I haven't seen Johanna, since. Most people just die, and stay dead.”

Crawford nodded several times and looked out the window at the Romanesque spire of St. Bride's. He had to remind himself that all this distressing business really might be true. He had seen what he'd seen, done what he'd done.

“Why have
you
caught their attentions?” he asked. “I suppose I can see now why the—the thing on the bridge recognized
me,
but why did it recognize you?”

“Oh, why do you suppose?” He was surprised to see a glint of tears in her eyes a moment before she angrily cuffed them away.

“Girls in that trade,” she went on, “may sometimes unknowingly have congress with adopted human members of that terrible family. Even a … brief connection of that sort looks like trespass to those creatures, suffices to rouse their jealousy.” Crawford glanced at her, but she was avoiding his eyes. “A month or so before you and I … met,” she said, “there was a young man, at an accommodation house in Mayfair. Afterward, he seemed ill at ease, more than the ordinary, and he urged me to enroll at the Magdalen Penitentiary in Highgate; he said the priests and sisters there could help me
undo bad connections
I'd made. I thought he was just another guilty Christian trying to salve his conscience after the fact, after the act … until I walked outside again.”

She shivered. “Right away, as soon as I was out under the night sky again, there was … webs in the air, and a smell like rainy streets, or broken stone, very strong. Old Carpace had made sure all the girls knew what to do when that happened, and she always made us wear some metal on our shoe soles at night—sometimes pattens, otherwise anything wired on—holed coins, spoons, eyeglasses.”

“Really. And what were you—” Crawford began, but the caged bird began chirping rapidly, and McKee pulled a tiny cloth bag from a pocket in her coat, dug a pinch of what appeared to be white sand from it and sprinkled it through the cage bars onto the bird's tail.

“Salt?” said Crawford. “But you've already caught it.”

“Don't want anyone else to,” she said. “He senses a ghost—it happens from time to time—and the salt keeps the bird's spirit too heavy to catch it.” She managed to smile at him, though squinting. “This ave is for me.”

Crawford blinked. “I'm sure. So what were you supposed to do?—when the webs and smells happened?”

“Oh—run, get away from the spot they're focusing on, cross the river if possible and hope the metal on your shoes makes a kaleidoscope of your identity and location. Dive into the river if you have to.” She sighed. “I got away, but it—they, it—knows my spirit silhouette now. It was another three years before I finally took that fellow's advice and checked in at Magdalen.”

“And you still have to … take precautions?” He waved at the bird, which was huffing and squeaking.

“They're still
aware
of me. That's why I need the help of someone”—she made a tossing motion toward him—“who has a stake in this.”

“Agh.” Crawford thought of the half glass of whisky he had left on the mantel in his parlor. It didn't seem so repulsive now; he had been mad not to finish it. “Help to do what?”

“Everybody said Carpace died of consumption two years ago, while I was in Magdalen, but just yesterday I learned that she's alive, monstrously fat now and under a different name, and she's coming out socially
tonight,
hosting a salon for artists and writers in Bedford Square. I need, you and I need, to get in there. One of the women who's going to be there is a musician, and—she has a dog that you've treated! For an infected eye!”

McKee thrust a folded piece of paper at him. “I have the musician's name here—if you tell her you write poems, she can surely get you an invitation. We need to confront Carpace, find out from her where our daughter is buried.”

Crawford groaned and reached past her to pull the bell rope. “Listen,” he said. “Miss McKee. We don't. Wha—write
poems
? That was tragic, criminal, what happened to the child, and it may be that you can interest the law courts, but what good is there in finding a
grave? Poems?
You can't possibly—” The carriage was slowing again, and he half knelt on the crackling seat to fish some coins from his pocket. “I'll walk back.”

McKee grabbed his arm. “What if there
is
no grave? Or only an empty one? Listen to me! They say now that old Carpace didn't just tell us how to protect ourselves from the—the things, but every year offered
tribute
to them—put out a child for them to take, as they took your son. I'm sure Carpace had a lot of children to choose the tribute from, in any year, but—I need to
know
that Johanna is safely dead.
You
need to know it.”

Crawford had hold of the door handle. “You said she was.” He was sweating in spite of the chilly air.

“She probably is. Is that enough?”

Humans aren't my concern, thought Crawford desperately. They're God's lookout.

But this child had not been baptized—God wouldn't have claimed her.
Cold and starvation.

“She's our daughter,” said McKee. “It's what we can do for her.”

“
What
is what we can do?”

“If she's truly and ordinarily dead, nothing. But if she's not, if she's come back from the dead, like Girard … we can put her to rest.”

Crawford was thinking of his son. “By what means?”

Tears were running down McKee's cheeks, but her eyes were steady. “What do you think? What did your parents tell you? Silver bullets, a wooden stake through her heart—we can free her, let her ghost sink down into the Thames to oblivion with all the rest of London's peaceful dead.”

The cab had squeaked and shuddered to a halt, not to let its passengers out but because the traffic through Ludgate Circus was for the moment a solid forest of stamping horses and vehicles with halted, dripping wheel rims.

Crawford pushed the door open and stepped out onto the iron footrest above the mud. The cold morning air was cacophonous with the yells of frustrated cab men and the monotonous cries of street vendors, and the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral stood in black silhouette directly east of him, blocking the sun, framed by the receding rooftops and spires of lesser buildings.

Crawford took a deep breath of the cold sausage-and-horse-dung breeze. It was real with Girard, Crawford thought—why shouldn't it be real with this child?
Can
you walk away from this?

He imagined hopping down from the carriage, threading his way through the stopped vehicles to the curb and walking back to Wych Street, leaving this woman to pursue her phantom alone.

This woman, he thought—the mother of my child; her phantom—our daughter.

He would need the half glass of whisky when he got home. Another glass too, probably.
Another and another cup to drown / The memory of this impertinence,
as Omar Khayyam had written.

Hardly impertinence, though.

He was still holding the slip of paper McKee had handed to him, and he glanced at it. It was an address in Wardour Street, back the way they had come; and he recognized the woman's name and remembered her dog.

The driver was squinting down at him, and Crawford sighed and handed the paper and another half crown up to the man.

“This address,” he called, speaking loudly to be heard over all the impatient shouting in the street. Concerned about the right-side mare, he pointed at her and added, “Broken-winded! Give her soft food and raw pork fat!” He waited until the driver nodded, then he folded himself back into the cab and pulled the door closed.

“What time tonight?” he asked McKee.

“Eight.” She was peering out the window at the irregularly shifting tide of horses and vehicles. “Good thing we got an early start.”

“I'm not going to write any poetry.”

Still looking out at the crowded street, she shook her head impatiently. “Once we're in there it won't matter. And in any case you could copy out some lines from the middle of a Southey epic, nobody alive has read those.”

S
IX MILES NORTHWEST
of the Fleet Street traffic and the long blue shadow of the St. Paul's dome, up among the woods and country roads north of Hampstead Heath, the cold eastern wind swept through the bare yew branches and over the snow-drifted lawns of Highgate Cemetery and down the white lanes on the west slope of Highgate Hill. It blew pennants of snow from the roof of the three-story Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women at the south end of Grove Lane and whistled in through the one-inch opening of a window on the ground floor.

The breeze lifted a sheet of paper from the desk by the window and spun it away, and when it hit the wooden floor with a sharp tap, the woman at the desk looked up.

Momentarily disoriented, she blinked around at the narrow room—the bed, the bookcase, the cold gas jet, the print of Jesus hung on the plaster wall. She dropped the pen she'd been holding and moved some papers aside in order to touch the Bible on the desk, and then her hand fell to the crucifix hanging from the narrow rope at her waist.

She knew she was supposed to be correcting proofs here, but her mind must have wandered. Had she been writing? The brass pen nib gleamed with fresh ink.

She sighed shakily and pushed the chair back and stood up, more comfortable in this black dress and white muslin cap than in the necessarily-more-frivolous dresses she wore when she wasn't on residence duty, and before picking up the sheet of paper on the floor she stepped to the door and looked through the little window into the empty dormitory. Sunlight slanted in through the tall eastern windows and lit the neatly made beds between the low partitions. The girls had all attended the Sunday service in the chapel at dawn and were now having breakfast in the refectory, soon to start their daily tasks in the laundry and kitchen. Thirty-seven girls were in residence at the moment, the youngest sixteen and the oldest twenty-four.

Three of them would soon have completed their two-year stay, during which time they would have learned household skills that would qualify them for domestic positions in the colonies or in distant parts of England.

On the desk behind Sister Christina lay the neglected galley proofs of a collection of her poetry, soon to be published by Macmillan—but it was her reluctant duty to confiscate from the new girls the books of poetry that they frequently arrived with. The books were often gifts from former clients, and therefore considered dangerous reminders, and in any case the romantic fancies of modern verse seemed likely to be lures back into sin. But the girls nevertheless often quoted poets like Byron and Coleridge and Browning, and, when they were invited to choose new names for themselves, regularly chose names like Haidee or Juliet or Christabel. A few, like Adelaide McKee two years ago, resolutely kept their old names and stayed in London, and Sister Christina worried and prayed for them—especially Adelaide.

The literacy of many of these ex-prostitutes had surprised Christina when she began volunteering here four years ago. She had assumed that London's population of streetwalkers was exclusively drawn from the lowest levels of poverty and ignorance, but she had discovered that this was by no means always the case; the girls weren't encouraged to talk about their pasts, but their accents and table manners often hinted at respectable middle-class origins, as did the clue—gathered from their admittance forms—that many of them had more than one baptismal name.

Christina turned and looked warily at the sheet of paper lying on the worn floor. She could see from here that it was covered with lines in her own handwriting, but she had no memory of writing it. She shivered.