Hide Me Among the Graves

PROLOGUE

THE FELT-PADDED BASE of the ivory bishop thumped faintly on the marble chessboard.

“Check,” said the girl.

The face of the old man across the table from her was in shadow — the curtains were drawn across the street-side windows, and the chandelier overhead hung crookedly because of the gas-saving mantle screwed onto it — and all she could see under the visor of his black cap was the gleam of his thick spectacles as he peered at the chess pieces.

Both of them hated to lose.

“And mate in … two,” he said. He sat back, blinking owlishly at the girl.

She sighed and spread her hands. “I believe so, Papa.”

The old man thoughtfully lifted the ebony king from the board and looked toward the fireplace, as if considering throwing the piece onto the coals. Instead he put it into the pocket of his robe, and when his hand reemerged it was holding instead a thumb-sized black stone statue.

Christina raised her eyebrows.

Old Gabriele’s answering smile was wry. “I carry it around with me now,” he said, “very close. Not that it does me any good anymore. Nothing does.”

He put it down onto the square where his king had stood, and it clicked against the marble.

Wanting to head off yet another melodramatic elaboration along the lines of his Nothing does, Christina quickly asked, “What sort of good did it once do? You’ve said it’s buona fortuna.”

She and her sister and two brothers had seen the little statue on a high shelf in their parents’ bedroom ever since they could remember, and they had even taken it down and incorporated the stumpy little stone man into their games when they were alone, but this was the first time in her fourteen years that she had ever seen it downstairs.

“It led me to your mother,” he said softly, “all the way from Italy to England, and I thought it might keep us healthy and prosperous, not — not destitute and losing my sight—‘And that one talent which is death to hide, lodged with me useless…’”

Christina could see him blinking behind the thick lenses, and saw the glint of the tears that were always embarrassingly ready these days, especially when he quoted Milton’s sonnet about going blind. She wished she had let him win the chess game.

Adopting a manner that reminded her of someone, Christina lightly quoted a later line from the same sonnet as she stood up and began to pick the chess pieces from the board: “‘Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?’” And she smiled at him and went on, “‘I fondly ask.’”

“Yes, you foolishly ask,” he snapped. “Where is your mother, tell me that! Embroidering in the drawing room, could it be? Corpo di Bacho, where is the drawing room?”

It occurred to Christina who it was that her own indulgently dismissive manner reminded her of — her mother, comforting Christina or one of her siblings when they used to wake up from nightmares.

And she remembered that when they had been troubled by nightmares, her father had always dropped the little stone statue into a glass of salted water. She couldn’t recall now whether it had ever helped.

Her mother at the moment was out at work as a day governess, and this rented house on Charlotte Street had no drawing room.

Christina had laid all the chessmen except the black king into the wooden box, and now, leaving the statue alone on the board, she knelt by her father’s blanketed knees and took his cold, dry, wrinkled hand.

“How did it lead you to Mother?”

He was frowning. “‘Light denied,’” he said. “I should destroy the damned thing. This is my last summer. Italy never again.”

She blew a strand of hair back from her forehead. “I won’t listen to you when you talk like that.” Again she reminded herself of her mother, as if she were the parent now, and her father had become a petulant child.

“Is it a compass?” she asked.

After a moment his scowl relaxed into a grudging smile. “You were always a contrary little beast. Tantrums. Cut yourself with scissors once when your mother corrected you! I should never have told you about it.”

“Tell me about it.”

He sighed. “No, child, it’s not a compass. Am I being selfish? It gives you dreams … that are not really dreams.”

“Like second sight?”

“Yes. I knew about … statues, from my days as curator of ancient statuary at the Museum of Napoli — some of them are not entirely lifeless. And I belonged to the Carbonari there, who also know more than a little about such things.”

Christina nodded, noting the black spot on his palm — he had often told the children that it was the mark of Carbonari membership.

“And then King Ferdinand outlawed the Carbonari, and I fled to Malta — but in ’22, when I was thirty-five, there was an earthquake, and I,” he said, scratching his palm, “sensed this little stone, north of me. A summoning compass, if you like! I sailed east of Sicily, past the Gulf of Taranto and Apuleia, many perils, all the way up the east coast of Italy to Venice, following the, the dream-song that led me to find him”—he nodded toward the tiny lone figure on the chessboard—“in the possession of an ignorant Austrian soldier.”

“… Led you to find him.” Not it, she thought.

He freed his hand to ruffle her brown hair. “Understand, child, I had at that point nothing to lose. The Pope had already excommunicated the Carbonari.”

Christina was momentarily glad that her sister, Maria, was living with another family as a governess, for Maria was virtuous and devout; and that her brother William was at work at the government tax office in Old Broad Street, for at the age of fifteen William was already a mocking skeptic.

Her brother Gabriel, though, who was off at Sass’s art academy in Bedford Square, would be intrigued. Christina wished he were here.

She nodded. “I understand.”

Hesitantly she reached her hand across toward the statue, giving her father time to tell her not to; but he made no objection, and her fingers closed around the cold thing.

Into her mind sprang the last line of the Milton sonnet: I also serve who only stand and wait. But that wasn’t right — it was supposed to be They, not I.

“You shouldn’t touch it,” he said, now that she already had.

She let go of it and drew her hand away. “Did you buy … it, from the Austrian soldier?”

Her father waved his hand in front of his spectacles. “In a sense, child.”

Christina nodded. “And this little stone man gave you a — a vision of Mother? Here in England?”

“That it did, though I’d never been to England, and I fell in love with her image — and set out to find her and marry her.” He nodded firmly. “And I did.”

Christina smiled. “Love at first second sight.”

But her father’s face sagged in renewed self-pity, the vertical lines around his mouth making him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Poor Frances Polidori! Working for wages in strangers’ houses now! It was a bad day for her when she became Frances Rossetti, married to this half-blind wretch who earns nothing anymore — whose only hope now is to … to move on, and join so many of our old friends!”

He cast a theatrical glance at the framed portrait on the far wall. It was a picture of his wife’s brother, John Polidori.

Christina recalled that her uncle had committed suicide in 1821—four years before her father found her mother. Her father couldn’t ever have met the man.

“Did you put it under your pillow, like a piece of wedding cake?” she asked, springing to her feet and crossing to the street-side window.

The rings hissed on the rod as she pulled the curtains aside, letting in afternoon sunlight reflected from the row of tan-colored houses on the other side of the Charlotte Street pavement. She glanced left and right through the glass, hoping her brother Gabriel might be coming home early from the art academy, as he often did, but she didn’t see his slim, striding figure among the weaving hedge of horses and carriage wheels.

From behind her came her father’s frail voice: “Turn off the gas, if you’re going to scorch us with sunlight! What pillow?”

She turned back to her father, and the sun glare from the windows across the street now made momentary dark webs in her vision, connecting everything in the parlor.

“In Malta,” she said. “Did you put the little man under your pillow?”

“Don’t touch it again, Christina,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t — I should have thrown him into the sea. Yes, under my pillow, on Midsummer’s Eve.”

Christina recalled that today was Midsummer’s Eve — June 23. Was that why her father had brought the thing downstairs and shown it to her?

He was shaking his head, and strands of his sparse white hair were falling over his glasses. “It’s a wicked trick, no good from it — you children, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades! Where did that come from? Eh?”

Christina smiled as she walked back across the old carpet to the table and stood on a chair to reach the stopcock at the base of the chandelier. When she and her brothers and sister had been children, they had played endless games of whist and Beggar My Neighbor in the nursery, and at some point they had each adopted one of the suits of cards: Gabriel was hearts; William, spades; Maria, clubs; and Christina was diamonds.

“I think several of us dreamed it,” she said, hopping back down to the floor, “and it was fun to have … secret identifications.”

“Not in a house with children!” muttered the old man. “And even now, you’re only fourteen! I’ve been a terrible father.”

Christina paused, staring at him. She and her siblings had read Maturin’s eerie Melmoth the Wanderer and The Arabian Nights, and their mother often read to them from the Bible. William would scoff, but William was at work.

“Just,” she said, “with it under your pillow? No … special rhyme to say?”

“Prayers, you should say! With a rosary under your pillow! Not what I did…”

“What did you do, Papa?” she asked softly. “Confess.” His mention of rosaries had reminded her that he was at least nominally Catholic, though her mother and her sister were devout Anglicans.

“Promise me you’ll destroy it when I’m gone — crush it and scatter the powder into the sea. Promise.”

Not destroy it now? she thought. “I promise.”

“I — God help me. I bled on it. I rubbed some of my blood on it, first. Promise! — but where would you children be, if I had not? Is it a sin to have sired the four of you? What would have become of Frances, as she was — a governess and still unmarried at twenty-six? Now she’s the wife of a professor of Italian at King’s College!”

A retired professor, thought Christina, with no pension. But, “Just so,” she said.

He had begun coughing piteously, and it probably wasn’t all for show — he did have bronchitis again.

“Stir up the fire, vivace mia,” he quavered.

Christina slid the fire screen aside and reached into the fireplace with the shovel and pushed the gray coals into a pile to make a bed for a handful of fresh lumps of coal from the iron basket on the hearth.

Then she heard her brother Gabriel’s boots tapping up the steps, and a moment later heard the hallway door unlatch and swing open. The air in the parlor shifted and abruptly seemed stuffy when Gabriel strode into the room with a few whirls of the outside summer breeze still at his back.

“Salve, buona sera!” he said with cautiously preemptive cheer, tossing a couple of books onto a chair by the door and shrugging out of his coat.

Christina knew he was apprehensive about having left school early — their father often complained that Gabriel was wasting the tuition money — but her brother’s first words had made her realize that she and her father had been speaking in English. Everyone in the family was fluent in both English and Italian, but old Gabriele nearly never spoke English in his home.

Her father closed his hand over the little statue and returned it to his pocket.

Christina glanced at the old man, and he very slightly shook his head. Do you mean stop speaking English now, she wondered, or stop talking about the statue?

Either way, her brother’s jarring entrance — he was riffling through the mail beside the empty chessboard now, looking very much the man of the house in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, though he was only two years older than Christina — had broken the morbid, secretive mood. Gabriel’s ostentatious youth, his clear blue eyes and his untidy auburn hair, made her father seem decrepit and almost senile by comparison.

“Buona sera, Gabriel,” she said, and added, still in Italian, “Would you like some tea?”

BY SEVEN O’CLOCK WILLIAM and their mother had come home from their jobs, and after the family had dispatched a platter of pasta primavera, three elderly Italian men came calling and sat with Christina’s father on chairs dragged up by the fire.

Christina and her brothers sat at the window-side table, sketching and composing rhymes by lamplight while the old men argued politics in histrionic Italian on the other side of the room, airing their eternal grievances against the Pope, and the kings of France and Napoli, and the Austrians who controlled Italy.

Christina and her brothers half listened to the familiar talk, and their mother sat at the cleared dining table in the next room with a stack of clothes, stitching up frayed sleeves and darning stockings.

The daylight on the bricks and windows across the street slowly faded from gold to gray, and then the curtains were pulled across and the chandelier was relit, and eventually the clatter of hooves and wheels on the pavement outside became just the fast snare-drum approach and diminishment of individual hansom cabs.

At one point Christina heard the old men talking about the Carbonari, and she looked up from her sketch of a rabbit.

Her father might have been watching her for several seconds, for immediately he beckoned to her; and when she had got up and walked across to his chair, he pulled a folded handkerchief from his robe pocket and handed it to her.

“Hold it for me,” he said quietly, in English.

Christina knew that her mother couldn’t see them from the other room — and she didn’t need to unfold the handkerchief to know that it was wrapped around the little statue, for she could feel the cold of the stone through the linen.

She gave him a quizzical glance, for earlier he had said that he carried the thing around with him now — and he had told her not to touch it. His expression was impossible to read behind his thick lenses, though, so she nodded and tucked it into the pocket of her frock and went back to her sketching.

But her rabbit began to go wrong under her darting pencil — the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature’s face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading — and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.

“I think I’ll go up to bed,” she said. She curtsied toward the blinking old men but avoided looking at her father, and she hurried from the parlor to say good night to her mother and to light a candle to guide her up the stairs.

UNTIL FOUR MONTHS AGO Christina had shared the slant-ceilinged bedroom on the third floor with her older sister, Maria, but Maria had left home on her seventeenth birthday to work as a governess for the children of a family in the country. Maria was the one who always remembered to say her prayers, and Christina, now alone, often forgot.

Tonight she forgot. She lit a pair of candles that stood on a niche in the chimney bricks, washed her face in the basin and brushed her teeth, but as she climbed into the bed in the corner and blew out the candles and pulled the bed curtain across, her thoughts were of her father’s little statue. It still sat rolled in the handkerchief in her frock, which hung now from a hook by the door.

The window overlooking Charlotte Street was outside the tent made by the bed curtain, so she sat up and pulled the heavy fabric aside — drafts or no drafts — and stared at the dimly glowing east-facing square in the wall. She was seeing it nearly end on, and couldn’t hope to glimpse stars through the sooty glass, but she was vividly aware of the volume of space outside, all the tangled streets sloping down to the dark moving river, and the vast breathing sea out beyond all the bridges and docks — and then she was dreaming, for under the moon the river and the sea were alive with hundreds, thousands of pale figures waving jointless arms, dark spots intermittently appearing on their distant faces as eyes and mouths opened and closed.

The window rattled, and she was fully awake again. She and her siblings called that dream the Sea-People Chorus, and she hoped it wouldn’t persist all night, as it sometimes did.

She preferred it to the visions of the creature she called Mouth Boy, though — an apparition who never appeared to the others, and whose head was flat because it was just an enormous mouth, with no eyes above or behind it. And even as she thought of him she thought she heard his characteristic harsh bellow’s breath all the way up from the pavement below the window; it might have been an exhalation of his that had made the window rattle.

It was unpleasant to have such dreams when Maria wasn’t in bed beside her! Often Christina and Maria would have had the same nightmare, and been able to hold each other in the darkness and reassure each other that the visions were imaginary.

This night seemed full of ghosts and monsters impatient to command her helpless attention — and her eyes darted to the faint outline of the door across the room, beside which hung her frock.

The window rattled again, and her resolve was instant. She bounded out of bed in her nightgown and groped her way to that corner and patted her hung frock till she felt the lump that was the handkerchief, and in a moment she had fumbled it out, shaken the little stone figure free, and hurried back to bed with the cold thing in her fist.

Blood, she thought — and she bit her finger, chewing beside the nail and ignoring the pain, until she could feel slickness there with her thumb. She rubbed the wet ball of her thumb over the tiny face of the stone figure, feeling the points that were the crude nose and chin of it.

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?”

“No — he’s aware of me — I can feel his attention like spiderwebs — but—” Christina looked up at the fading blue sky and then looked around nervously at the chapel and the grassy hills. “We’d see him, if he could hear us. Why?”

“I can think of a couple of things we might try,” said Maria gruffly. “One, out of Papa’s old Hebrew books, would surely damn our souls.”

Out of consideration for her sister, Christina asked, “What’s the other?”

“Well — Mama was a Polidori. She said the family, Grandpa and all of them, liked to think they were descended from Polydorus, in the Iliad and the Aeneid.”

“That’s right.” Christina crouched beside her horse’s front legs, for she still felt dizzy. “You wanted to call Grandpa’s house in Park Village ‘Myrtle Cottage’ because of something to do with Polydorus.”

Maria nodded and cast a long look at the churchyard gate, and at the dozen headstones standing up in the shadowed grass beyond it, then sighed and led her horse away, across the road to a ditch and a low fieldstone wall. Beyond the wall a wide field sloped up to a hedge, still brushed with gold sunlight, on the crest of the hill.

Christina straightened up and followed, scuffing her shoes in the dust as she pulled her own horse clopping along after her.

“What did Polydorus do, again?”

“Die, mainly,” said Maria over her shoulder. “In the Aeneid they find his body, his unrestful murdered body, tangled up in the roots of a myrtle bush on the island of Thrace, and they give it proper honors and — and it’s implied that the ghost lies quiet after that.”

“Can we give—him—those ‘proper honors’?”

Maria muttered some Latin hexameters under her breath, then said, “Milk and blood, and dirt piled on him. And black fillets, like hair ribbons — and the Trojan women let down their hair in grief.”

Christina was leaning forward to rest her elbows on the waist-high stone wall and looking away, up the hill. The stone was still warm, though the breeze was now uncomfortably chilly.

“The question is,” Maria went on, “will he recognize it as a fitting au revoir for a Polidori? Not just fitting, in fact, but compelling?”

Christina said, “I don’t know,” in a weary exhalation. “Can you ride back and get milk? And black ribbons?”

“Surely. Er … what will we do for blood?”

“He’s had enough of mine.” Christina waved back toward the chapel without looking at it. “Would there be sacramental wine?”

She heard Maria gasp. “That would be sacrilege!”

“It’s only wine, Maria — we’re not Catholics! But he was raised Catholic, he might believe it’s blood.” Their grandparents had raised their mother and aunts Anglican and their uncles Catholic, and Christina supposed that the beliefs would have been deeply implanted into her uncle John, even if he later rejected them.

She looked up at the darkening sky. “I think he’s … not far off.” Her voice was unsteady.

“I’ll hurry,” said Maria, stepping up into the saddle and settling her right leg over the fixed pommel. She deftly reined the horse around and set off at a trot back toward the Read house.

THE SKY WAS MUCH darker by the time Maria came riding back less than ten minutes later, and the hill beyond the low wall was a patchwork of grays shifting in the chilling wind. Christina was standing in the road by the wall, facing the hill.

“This is a bad idea,” Maria said, lowering herself carefully from the saddle while clutching a screw-top glass jar in one hand. “‘If ’twere done, ’twere best done quickly.’”

Christina nodded and touched the gold chalice that now stood on the rough top edge of the wall, but she didn’t take her eyes from the hillside.

“I fetched this from across the road,” she said quietly. “And we’re all here.”

She was staring at a hunched silhouette that stood halfway up the shadowed slope, and a moment later she heard Maria gasp and scuffle backward.

“Is that … him?” Maria whispered.

Christina’s breath caught in her throat when she tried to answer, but she managed to nod.

The ashy figure up on the slope seemed to sway and flutter in the breeze, but it didn’t shift its position.

After a long, strained moment, “Back to the house!” said Maria breathlessly, grabbing Christina’s shoulder; “or no — into the chapel!”

“He’s blind,” said Christina, “no eyes. And he can’t hurt you without you inviting him.” She looked away from the distant figure to face her sister. “As I invited him, Maria! And he’s … our uncle.”

“He’s — he doesn’t look anything like — any of us!” Maria was still gripping her sister’s shoulder. “He looks like — some kind of shark!”

“He hasn’t been well. And he’s more Mouth Boy now than our uncle John.”

Maria let go of her sister’s shoulder. “Mouth Boy?” she said in a wailing whisper. “What, from your old nightmares?”

Christina nodded. “I suppose I’ve always been waiting for him, and that’s the — the sketch I did in advance. He’s partly assumed it now, out of economy.”

Maria took a deep breath and let it out shakily. “I said I’d do this, and I will. But God help us.”

Christina reached a trembling hand into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the little black stone figure. “Tell me what to do.”

“I don’t want to get on the same side of the wall as him,” Maria said. “Stop looking at him! Yes, you invited him, and we’ve got to uninvite him, surely. Ach, but I think it should be in the grass, on that side. The road dirt’s packed too hard to dig anyway. And the milk and — and blood wouldn’t sink in. I should have fetched a trowel. Maybe the—”

Christina was looking at her sister, and now reached out to touch her lips to stop her talking. “In the grass it is,” she said, and she turned away from the hill to hike herself up onto the wall, then swung her legs around and hopped down into the calf-high grass. “Thank you for doing this,” she said over her shoulder, trying to sound more resolute than she felt. “For saving me.”

“If I’m not damning us both.”

Maria clambered over the wall herself and immediately crouched to begin pulling up clumps of long grass and then scooping out the warm black loam underneath. “You watch him!” she said in a shrill whisper. “If he comes this way, run for the chapel!” She glanced up at her sister, and then hissed, “Jesus save us, are you smiling at him?”

“I’m the last sight he’ll see, God willing.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Kneel down here — and let down your hair. We’re supposed to be mourning.”

“I think,” said Christina, reaching behind her head as she knelt in the grass, “I am.”

Maria pulled clips from her own black hair and shook it out. Both girls were shivering. “I can mourn for our uncle,” Maria said, “dead these twenty-four years.”

Christina kissed the stone before laying it into the shallow hole Maria had dug. Maria frowned but didn’t say anything and began piling the damp earth onto it.

“More,” she said. “We want a mound.”

Christina pulled up some more sheaves of grass and gouged up handfuls of dirt from underneath and added them to the pile.

From her pocket Maria pulled three black ribbons, and after a moment’s hesitation she laid them crossed in a star pattern over the little mound.

Then she shook the jar she’d brought from the house—“It’s supposed to be foaming,” she said — and poured milk over the mound. In the gathering darkness the milk hardly showed on the black mound, and in a moment it had disappeared.

“Now the blood,” she said.

Christina reached behind her and lifted the chalice from the wall top and handed it to Maria.

“Rest in peace, Uncle John,” said Maria softly as she poured the wine over the dirt. “Please.”

Christina nodded and managed to say, “Go.”

She glanced up quickly, and Maria flinched back with a gasp, for a deeper shadow had seemed to fall across them from only a yard away — and then it was gone, and the grass was rippling in waves away from the raw mound.

Christina was reminded of having once at twilight walked through a field of tall grass and disturbed sleeping birds, who darted short distances away without appearing above the grass tops, so that her passage had seemed to cause ripples, as if she were wading through a pond instead of grass.

She thought she caught a whiff of the sea, or gunpowder, and the metallic smell of blood.

She rubbed her hand over her face, and there was no more sensation of clinging spiderwebs. “He’s gone,” she whispered, feeling empty.

“Thank God.” Maria got laboriously to her feet, brushing off the front of her riding habit. “We must return the chalice.”

“Tomorrow I’ll dig the statue up again,” said Christina. “Papa will be relieved to have it back, even inert.”

Maria started to speak, then just shook her head.

The two girls led the horses back across the road, and within minutes they were mounted and trotting away through the deepening gloom toward the lights of the Read house.

THE WIND FROM THE north swept the grass in even waves across the slope in the darkness, but in the patch of grass by the wall, the waves converged in on the mounded pile of fresh-turned dirt and combed the grass into a spiral, and then the grass blades and the mound flattened, as if under a weight.

By morning the grass had straightened up again, as if the weight had joined the milk and wine in soaking into the ground, or as if it had risen and moved away.