Hide Me Among the Graves

CHAPTER ONE

WYCH STREET WAS two rows of tall old houses facing each other across a narrow pavement now dusted with snow, just north of the broad lanes of the Strand and only a few streets from the line of arches along the land-facing side of Somerset House. The cold morning sun silhouetted the steeple of St. Clement Danes to the east and lanced down the street — here glaring from the panes of a bay window on an upper floor, there glittering in the frost crystals on a drainpipe slanting across a still-shadowed wall — and a woman in a blue coat was walking slowly down the middle of the pavement with the sun at her back.

Her hands were hidden in an oversized white ermine muff, and her breath was puffs of steam whisked away on the breeze as she peered at the variously shaped dark doorways she passed on either side. Finally she halted, and for nearly a minute just stared at a brass plaque beside the door of an otherwise unremarkable house:

The plaque read: JOHN CRAWFORD, M.R.C.V.S. SURGERY FROM 9 TO 11 O’CLOCK.

The knocker was a wrought-iron cat’s head, hinged at the top.

A bigger plume of steam blew away from under her bonnet, and then she stepped to the door and carefully freed one gloved hand to give the knocker two sharp clanks.

“In sunshine or in sha-adow,” she sang softly to herself; then she smiled and touched the ermine muff. “And kneel and say an ave there for me.”

She heard steps from inside, and a curtain twitched in the frosted window at her left, and then a bolt rattled and the door swung inward.

The man who had opened the door blinked out at her without recognition. “Is it an emergency?” he asked. “The surgery isn’t open for hours yet.”

He wore a brown sack-coat with an outmoded plaid shawl over his shoulders, and she noted that his beard was still dark brown.

“Come in,” he added, stepping aside.

She walked past him into the hallway’s warm smells of bacon and garlic and tobacco as he closed the door behind her and asked, “Can I take your coat?”

She laid the muff on a table and pulled off her muddy boots and her gloves; then she shrugged out of her blue velveteen coat, and as she handed it to him, the muff on the table squeaked and chirped.

He paused, looking from it to her, and raised his eyebrows.

“Er … do you,” she asked with a tight smile, “minister to birds?”

“I really only ever go as small as chickens, and that sounded like a songbird. My main customers are cab horses, and I do pro bono publico work for stray cats.” He smiled. “But I suppose I can advise, if you’ll bring the patient in.” He waved toward an open doorway, and the woman retrieved the muff and stepped through into a parlor with framed hunting prints on the green-papered walls. The ivory-colored curtains over the front windows had probably been white originally.

A cold fireplace gaped below a marble mantelpiece that was still hung with tinsel and wilted holly. A dozen wooden chairs were ranked closely along two of the walls, and a long couch hid the sills of the street-side windows. Half a dozen cats were sprawled on the couch and the low table.

“Do sit,” said Crawford. “I’ll fetch in some tea.”

He disappeared through an inner door, and the woman pushed several of the cats off the couch onto the carpet — one had only three legs, and another appeared to have no eyes, though they all scampered away energetically — and sat down on the cleared cushion. She carefully slid a small cylindrical birdcage no bigger than a pint-pot out of the ermine muff and set it upright on the table. The tiny brown bird within peered around the room, paying no evident attention to the retreating cats.

This room was chillier than the entry hall, and, in addition to the apparently constant whiff of garlic, smelled of dogs and spirits of camphor. A framed notice between two pictures of leaping horses listed prices of various operations and remedies.

Crawford came pushing back in through the door carrying a tray, and as he set it on the table he said, “And what ails your bird, Miss…?”

“McKee,” she said. “Adelaide McKee.” He had poured steaming tea into a cup, and she accepted it with a nod, ignoring the pots of sugar and milk. “Who is Mister C.V.S.? I didn’t notice the sign the last time I was here.”

“Mister…? Oh! That’s me, I suppose. The whole thing stands for Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.” He pulled up one of the wooden chairs and sat down across the table from her. “You’ve been here before? Was it another case of bird malaise?”

“I gave you a different name then.” She untied the strings of her bonnet and pulled it off, shaking out her shoulder-length chestnut curls. “And it was seven years ago.” She glanced around the room. “Frankly, I’m surprised to find you still here.”

Crawford had poured himself a cup too, and started to raise it, but now he clanked it back down onto the saucer. His face was chilly with a sudden dew of sweat, and two full seconds later his ribs and the backs of his hands tingled with remembered fright and enormous present embarrassment.

HE HAD STILL BEEN drunk most of the time in that summer of 1855, and on many nights memories of his wife and two sons had kept him from sleeping; on those nights he had sat up drinking and trying to lose himself in cheap novels or, giving up on that, gone for long walks along the banks of the Thames.

And on one such rainy summer midnight, he had found himself drawn toward the lights along the south shore of the river — but when he had paid his ha’penny at the Strand-side turnstile of Waterloo Bridge and walked out as far as a recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge’s nine arches over the river, he stopped there with such deliberateness that he wondered for a moment if he had had some now-forgotten purpose in coming out here.

There were no lamps on the bridge, and he had been able dimly to see the silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral a mile away to the east, and strings of yellow and orange lights on the south shore flickering through the veils of rain. Occasional patches of moonlight shone on the rain-dulled water below him.

His wife and sons had died on the Thames two years earlier, in a boating accident, and he wondered, with some alarm, if his purpose in coming out here had been to throw himself into that same water, perhaps maudlinly inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem about a prostitute who had committed suicide off this bridge.

His wife’s name had been Veronica. His sons had been Girard and Richard. He stood there for several minutes, while rain washed away the tears on his cheeks, and told himself, They’re gone. They’re gone.

Over the hiss of the rain and the constant hoarse whisper of the river shifting around the bridge pilings below, he became aware of a metronomic clinking getting louder. A woman was walking toward him from the Blackfriars side of the bridge, and she evidently had metal pattens on her shoes to protect them from puddles. The round bulge at the top of her silhouette was certainly an umbrella. Embarrassed at being caught weeping, even though it would not be evident, Crawford straightened and wearily got ready to lift his hat as she passed him.

His hand was on the brim of his bowler hat, and the silhouette of the umbrella became wider as she presumably glanced toward him—

— And then for a frozen instant it seemed that a piece of the umbrella broke free and hung in the night air, swelling rapidly in size—

But it was something rushing down at the two of them out of the charcoal sky, something alive and churning and savage, and at the sudden roaring of it the woman glanced up and then leaped backward, colliding with Crawford and spinning him half around.

The harsh bass noise of the thing was like a locomotive about to hit them, compressing the air, and a sharp machine-oil smell like ozone was harsh in Crawford’s nostrils. In a convulsion of total panic, he seized the woman around the waist, boosted her right over the stone railing, and pitched her away from the bridge — she had been too breathless even to scream — and in the same motion he slapped one boot onto the wet stone bench and sprang over the railing after her.

Then he was plummeting through yards and yards of empty rushing air, and he crashed into the cold water before he had thought to take a breath; he might even have been screaming.

When he thrashed back up to the surface, gasping, he could see the woman flailing in the water near him, her billowing crinoline at once keeping her afloat and impeding her efforts to swim, but before struggling out of his heavy coat and starting through the water toward her, he threw a fearful glance up at the bridge high overhead. For a moment there might have been a flexing, spiky bulk visible at the railing, but if so, it had withdrawn by the time he had blinked water out of his eyes for a clearer look.

He swam to the struggling woman and grasped her upper arm, then began kicking through the frigid salt water toward the shore. The current swept them east, past the arches and water gates of Somerset House, and he managed to slant in at the steps below Temple Place. The woman had also lost or shed her jacket in the river, and both of them were shaking as they climbed on their hands and knees up the steps to the narrow river-side pavement.

Looking back fearfully, Crawford couldn’t make out the bridge at all in the darkness. From very far away he thought he caught a slow bass thrumming under the percussion of the storm.

His hand slapped his waistcoat pocket, but the little jar he sometimes remembered to carry wasn’t there.

Cold rain clattered around him, and river water dripped from his beard. “What,” he choked, “the bloody hell—was—”

She put her cold palm across his mouth so quickly that it was almost a slap, and water flew from her stringy wet hair. “Don’t … give words,” she panted. “Don’t … draw, attract.” She lowered her hand to grip the edge of the pavement. “We need to get indoors. Walls, a roof.”

He was panting too. “I — live near here. Five-minute walk.”

She nodded. “Good — but first—” She rolled over and sat up, apparently to untie one of her shoes. A moment later she handed him the metal frame that had been strapped to the bottom of it.

“Strap that over the sole of one of your boots,” she said. “Quickly — even with this change in our silhouettes, we’ve got to be inside before the rain washes the salty river water off us.”

He didn’t argue. He was still breathing rapidly, and when his shaking fingers discovered that the straps wouldn’t fit over the instep of his boot, he impatiently pulled his sopping scarf from around his neck and tore it lengthwise in half. He used the narrower strip to tie the metal sole onto his left boot, with a big wet knot over his instep.

The woman had got to her feet. “Come on,” she whispered. “You go, lead the way — I’ll follow about twenty feet behind you. We’ve got to stop our auras overlapping.”

“Auras.” Crawford stood up unsteadily on the wobbly metal sole. “We’re,” he said to her, “safe? For now?”

“Safe?” The streetlamps of Arundel Street ahead of them threw enough light for him to see her wondering frown. “Go. I’ll follow.”

The two of them weren’t much wetter than the few other pedestrians they passed, as first Crawford and then the woman crossed the muddy gravel lanes of the Strand, and the one cabbie that reined in his horse for a moment just shrugged and sped up again when Crawford waved him off. The unsynchronized crunch of the shared pair of pattens sounded like the footsteps of a drunk repeatedly attempting and then abandoning a difficult dance step.

When he had walked quickly down the narrow lane that was Wych Street to his own front door, he looked back as he dug the key from his pocket. The woman had stepped in under the overhanging upper floor of an old house a dozen yards behind him.

His hands were shaking but he was careful to twist the bolt back as quietly as possible, and then he paused to reach down and push the knotted strip of scarf forward off his boot; ordinarily he would have stepped straight into the parlor and yanked the bell-pull to summon Mrs. Middleditch from her little top-floor bedroom, but tonight he wanted to recover from whatever it was that he had just participated in, without extra witnesses.

He swung the door open, lifting its weight against the hinges, and stepped into the unlit entry hall. He waited until the woman had hurried in past him, then shut the door and rotated the bolt knob. The rattle of the rain on gravel was shut out, and the only sound was panting breath and the dripping of water on the waxed wooden floor.

The woman was carrying her shoes now, and laid them carefully on the hall table.

“This way,” he whispered, and stepped into the parlor.

The fire in the grate was just glowing coals, but he propped a couple of fresh logs in there and tucked some crumpled newspapers under them, and after he had fetched a decanter and two glasses, he and his unknown companion sat on the carpet in front of the reviving fire and took the first, restorative gulps of whisky. The warm liquor burned its way down his throat and began to loosen his tensed muscles.

The fire was flickering brightly now, and he pressed water from his hair and beard and then held his chilled palms out toward the heat. He exhaled, and for the first time looked squarely at his companion. She was younger than he had assumed, perhaps twenty. She had pushed her dark hair back from her forehead, and her face was pale and narrow.

The windows rattled, and the woman’s head whipped around — the noise wasn’t repeated, and after a few seconds, she slowly turned back toward the fire.

“Wind funnels down this street,” Crawford said. That was true, and probably it had been the wind. But he sighed and glanced at the clock on the mantel and saw that it was well after one in the morning. “I have a guest room, here, with a bath,” he said. “My housekeeper can show you where it is.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“What,” he began at last, giving her time to stop him; but the wide dark eyes simply held his, so he went on: “was that?”

Her abrupt laugh was quiet but jarring. “The gentleman wants to know what it was,” she said. “This isn’t your first drink of the evening, is it? Let’s see, it appeared when you and I were close enough that we could have touched each other, and you knew to get us into the river, and — and your parlor reeks of garlic! What do you, now that you can ponder it, imagine that it was?”

Crawford drained his glass and refilled it. “The garlic,” he said weakly, “is a disinfectant. Prevents mortification. I’m a veterinary surgeon.”

“A veterinary surgeon.” She looked around at the tidy room by the flickering firelight: the framed prints, the old-fashioned vine-patterned wallpaper, the street-side curtains. “Smells like you treat a lot of mortified horses right in here.”

What he smelled was river water, and it occurred to him that his watch was probably ruined. “You can’t expect me to explain medical—”

“A waste of time, I’m sure. Let’s talk about what happened just now. The thing on the bridge, the river—”

“Listen.” He shifted around on the carpet to face her more squarely. “Two years ago,” he said. He noticed that he was still shaking, and he took another swallow of the whisky. “Two years ago I was drunk. Not like this—really drunk. And I thought I saw a — a ghost, and it attacked me. I — hid from it—” He gave a hitching gasp and realized to his embarrassment that he was on the verge of sobbing again, as he had been on the bridge before this woman had appeared. He shook his head and stared blindly into the fire.

After a moment she asked quietly, “Why were you so drunk, before you saw the ghost?”

“Why,” he countered dully, “should it make a difference that we were close together, on the bridge?”

“Close together and out in the open, under the nighttime sky. Oh—” She shrugged. “I think it’s like … two candle flames are more visible if they’re held together, overlapping. Those things ordinarily don’t see us very well, thank God.”

“What … are they? The g-ghost, two years ago, I used garlic and the river to hide from it.”

“Didn’t you have any garlic tonight?”

He shook his head and again touched his damp waistcoat pocket. “Evidently not. My housekeeper is punctual about renewing the disinfectant garlic wash on the windowsills, but — these days I’m sometimes careless about carrying it with me.”

“Disinfectant garlic wash,” she said, apparently savoring the jargon. “Well, I should have been carrying some myself. But you never invited one of those things in here, I hope?”

“No.” He yawned, more from tension than fatigue. “I would have, this ghost, before it attacked me — but I was outdoors, by the river. And in any case I’ve moved since.”

“Ah.” She reached out and took his hand. Her hand was warm from the fire, but he still didn’t look at her. “Why were you so drunk?”

He was increasingly uncomfortable, with this conversation and also with the fact that he was alone here at this hour with this woman. Really he should summon Mrs. Middleditch.

“Drunks have hallucinations,” he said, more to himself than to her. “It might have been a hallucination, the ghost; this thing tonight doesn’t prove…”

She was still holding his hand. He glanced at her, and she was staring at him, her eyebrows raised.

Crawford took a deep gulp of the whisky and sighed. “Oh hell. The reason I was drunk was because my wife, and my two sons, had died the night before. They said, witnesses said, that lightning struck the ferryboat they were on.” He freed his hand to refill his glass, and he gave her a haggard caricature of a smile. “What of yourself? Do you have a family?”

“My husband died — uh, six months ago. We didn’t have any children.” She stretched her arms over her head and then sat forward, staring into the fire. “But you carried garlic with you, after. And you knew to get us both into the river tonight. How is it that you know these things?”

“I hate all this filthy stuff,” he said absently; then he frowned into the fire. “My parents had a history with creatures like that thing on the bridge, and they managed to elude them. They told me how. They were old and eccentric, and I didn’t entirely believe them.”

She stared at him with no expression. “Who was the ghost? The one that you would have invited in, but it attacked you?”

“It was — it was probably a hallucination.”

She didn’t look away.

He pressed his palms flat into the carpet but still felt as if he were losing his balance at the top of a high precipice.

But it was easier to go on than to stop now. “The witnesses — one of them said that my eldest son, Girard, was helping some person or — helping some person, onto the ferry from a boat that had drawn up alongside, in the moments before … before the vessel was struck.”

“The witness didn’t know it was your eldest son,” she said gently. “You knew it, later. When Girard’s ghost appeared to you. And attacked you.”

The ferry deck had been shattered but not scorched, he recalled, and the only reason the other passengers guessed that it had been lightning was because of the deafening, echoing roar that had shaken the boat in the moment of impact.

Why did I go walking on the bridge tonight? he asked himself. I don’t usually go out onto any of the bridges in my midnight walks. Why did I neglect to bring any garlic? Was I drunkenly hoping that Girard would come again, and finish me off?

Was that Girard?

“Attacked me, yes,” he said, almost matter-of-factly. “And I broke the garlic jar and ran into the river. I hid from him.”

“Lucky thing for you that you did.”

“Girard was my son, and he came back to me — and I hid from him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it wasn’t really him, you know, anymore. Not mostly.”

“I’d like to believe you’re right.” He thought of asking about her husband, then realized that he didn’t need to.

“‘The many men so beautiful,’” she said quietly, “‘and they all dead did lie, / and a thousand thousand slimy things / lived on, and so did I.’”

He recognized it as a line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The woman beside him shivered. “Thank you for rescuing me,” she whispered. “And taking me in like a hurt cat.”

“All the cats I take in,” he said, “are hurt cats.”

“I–I don’t even know your name.”

“John Crawford.”

“I’m Lisa Griffin.” She got lithely to her feet, but when he had stood up beside her, she swayed against him and he caught her elbow to keep her from falling. “I’m afraid the whisky has rather got on top of me,” she said with an awkward laugh. “Could you … escort me to this spare room?”

Mrs. Middleditch should escort her, he thought.

But he glanced at the curtained window and thought of the turbulent sky and all the lightless alleys out there in the cold rain, and he didn’t want to let go of this woman’s elbow.

“This way,” he said unsteadily, starting toward the stairs. He forced the thought of Veronica out of his mind.

NOW, SEVEN YEARS LATER, Crawford again picked up his teacup, and his hand didn’t shake.

“I—” he began hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and said, carefully, “I tried to find you, afterward.” He realized that he was stroking his beard as if miming deep thought and stopped.

The bird in the little cage on the table whistled several notes.

The woman nodded. “I believe you. But as I said, I gave you a false name that night. Griffin, wasn’t it? That was the street I was — living on. And I never had a husband.” She gulped some of the tea in her own cup, then abruptly set it down and whispered, “Of all the times I could ever have used a glass of whisky.”

It was only an hour or two after dawn, but Crawford said, “Would you like some? I might join you.”

“I gave it up.” She exhaled and stared squarely at him. “I was a prostitute, in those days. ‘Living upon the farm of my person,’ as the law has it. I’m not any longer.”

The little bird was darting glances from one of them to the other.

“Oh,” said Crawford blankly. “Good. That you — stopped.”

Over the years he had wondered about that, a woman walking alone on Waterloo Bridge after midnight, but it was still a shock to hear it confirmed.

“I enrolled myself in the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women, on Highgate Hill, and I spent two years there. Thanks to the sisters there, I was able to change my ways.”

“Oh.”

“And — before that”—she took a deep breath—“we had a daughter, you and I.”

CRAWFORD HELD UP HIS hand to stop her, then stood up and crossed to the mantel and poured several inches of whisky into a glass, from, he realized, the same decanter he had poured from seven years earlier. He drained half of it and then clicked the glass down on the mantel, and for several seconds he kept his hand on the glass and squinted at it. Finally he let go of it and turned toward her.

“How can you be — if you were—”

“I used what they call prophylactic measures when I was on the job,” she said flatly. “That night seven years ago was … spontaneous.”

Crawford wished he had not drunk the scotch, for he was dizzy and nauseated now, and his heart was pounding.

She glanced toward the inner door, behind which he could hear Mrs. Middleditch ascending the steps from the below-stairs kitchen.

“Let’s go for a walk,” McKee said, picking up her gloves from the table.

But Crawford sat down again. “The last time you and I were together, we got into trouble.”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, then apparently thought better of it.

“I mean outdoors,” he added, feeling his face heat up. “Overlapping candle flames, you said. We were more visible, to”—he waved vaguely—“things.”

“That was at night. They don’t generally travel abroad during the day.”

He shrugged and nodded. He recalled his parents telling him that. And Mrs. Middleditch was now audibly bustling around in the little dining room behind him.

He got to his feet again, reluctantly. “Very well. Let me get a hat and coat. And—” He stepped to the mantel and found the little bottle of ground garlic and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

She smiled. “In case we’re out past sunset?”

He ignored that and waved distractedly at the little cage on the table. “I can put the bird somewhere the cats can’t get to.”

“He can come along with us.”

CHAPTER TWO

MCKEE LOOKED LEFT and right at the brick and wood houses along the narrow street as Crawford pulled the door closed behind them, and then she peered up at the variety of snow-capped roofs and gables and projecting upper floors.

Her fur-trimmed bonnet hid her face. “This is an old street,” she said, her breath wisping away on the breeze like tobacco smoke.

“These are mostly Tudor houses,” he said gruffly. The air was so cold that it hurt his teeth to talk. “The Great Fire missed this area. I moved here nine years ago. Which way?”

The bird in her ermine muff chirped several notes, and she said, “East, I think — through the Temple Gate. Where did you live before?”

“Clerkenwell. But I wanted to be closer to the river, after—”

“After Girard,” she said, nodding.

He was startled, and even almost pleased, that she remembered the name after all these years. “And the next street toward the river is Holywell, and the story is that there was a holy well there once. It’s said to be under an inn now — still, a nice thing to have nearby.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I don’t know how holy it is anymore.”

Crawford blew away a cloud of his own. They were walking past the dark windows of the Angel pub, and the tall spire of St. Clement Danes stood on its island in the lanes of the Strand ahead.

McKee nodded. “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.”

Crawford frowned impatiently. “‘Had a daughter,’ you said. Not ‘have.’”

McKee wasn’t wearing the metal pattens now; her boot soles just scuffed on the old cobblestones under the swirls of snow.

“Her name,” she said, “was Johanna. She died. The woman who … housed and fed us, an old witch called Carpace who maintained a number of girls in a bawdy house in Southwark, she took Johanna away from me and then let her die, of neglect. Cold and starvation.”

They had emerged from the shadowy defile that was Wych Street into the crowded open square around St. Clement Danes, and the sky was a bright blue behind the smoke-stained spires and cupolas and chimney clusters of London’s skyline. Below that close horizon, pedestrians strode along in hats and overcoats, mostly clerks who lived out in suburbs like Hanwell or Dulwich and every morning walked to their jobs in shops and factories and inns of court, their boots now adding a tympanic rattle to London’s perpetual background rumble.

And already the broad lanes of the Strand were crowded with wheeled traffic. Crawford found himself squinting at the horses that pulled the tall omnibuses and cabs and barrel-laden carts, and he was cautiously pleased to see glossy coats, clear eyes, and firm steps.

I may well have treated some of these, he thought, for dysentery or mange or bronchitis. I can’t save people — especially the ones I’ve loved — but I can help animals. It’s God’s job, His neglected job, to save people.

But McKee’s words echoed in his head: cold and starvation.

If this woman hoped to wring money from him with her sordid tale, surely she would have claimed that the daughter was still alive.

“Was she,” he asked, “baptized?”

McKee was looking away, toward the columned gray front of the Provident Institution on the far side of the street, but he heard her say, “I try not to lie to people anymore.”

Ah, thought Crawford bleakly.

Then God had not claimed the child as His own — any more than He claimed all the blameless suffering animals.

“When?” he asked.

McKee looked back at him, her face pale in the ring of white fur. “In March of ’58. She was just two years old.”

Nearly four years ago. Crawford shook his head.

Children were dodging between the carts and carriages in the street, some of the ragged little figures seeming scarcely older than this alleged daughter would be if she had lived; they might have been playing some game this morning — they were singing some nursery rhyme that mingled in the chilly air with the clatter of hooves and the textured whir of metal wheel rims on frozen gravel.

Crawford looked back at McKee and spread his gloved hands. “I don’t see what I can do. What anyone can do.”

“You can get an invitation to a salon,” said McKee, “is what you can do, and bring me as your guest.”

Crawford lowered his arms. “A … salon.”

“Poets,” she said absently, watching the street children. Their narrow faces and bare arms and legs were darkened as if with soot, Crawford noticed, and though they were scampering back and forth in the street, none of the faces he glimpsed held any expression. “Artists,” McKee added.

“No, that’s quite — I’m sorry, but that sort of thing isn’t—”

Under the fur that covered her hands, the tiny bird squeaked four quick notes.

“Well, let’s consider,” McKee remarked quietly, perhaps talking to herself. “It’s not a day for boating.”

“No, it certainly is not,” exclaimed Crawford in alarm. “Around the church, and back, is enough of a — a stroll this morning. Really, Miss McKee—”

“Call me Addie,” she said, leaning forward on the pavement to look intently at the passing vehicles. “I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced.”

Crawford winced.

She bit one of her gloves and pulled it off, then stuck two bare fingers into her mouth and whistled four piercing notes very like the bird’s. Several men hurrying past looked back at her in surprise.

Crawford grimaced in embarrassment. “I really need to get back to my practice—”

“We’re bound that way,” she assured him, “just a bit roundabout. I think I may have attracted attention, forgive me.”

“Well — whistling—!”

The high-perched driver of a shiny two-wheeled hansom cab reined his horse in toward them, but McKee shook her head and waved him past, then after a moment whistled again in the same way.

This time it was a shabby old hackney coach that wobbled toward them, its two horses contradicting Crawford’s estimate a moment earlier of the evident health of London horses; the nostrils of the curbside mare were widely dilated and her flanks were twitching, and she was exhaling twice for every inhalation.

McKee stepped off the curb to nod and wave, and then she turned back toward Crawford.

He stared at the vehicle — the yellow paint on its bodywork was faded and chipped, and the door still carried the crest of whatever aristocratic family had long ago sold it.

“I am not—” he began.

But McKee had grabbed the arm of a man on the pavement, a nervous-looking young fellow with sparse muttonchop whiskers.

“Where are you walking to?” she asked him quickly.

“W-well,” the fellow stammered, “the — the Royal Exchange, ma’am, on Threadneedle Street—”

“We’re going that way, save some shoe leather and join us as a chaperone, no charge.” And as the young man was nodding eagerly and taking off his hat, she tossed a half-crown coin up to the driver and called, “Threadneedle Street.”

The hackney cab’s door was open and the young clerk was already climbing inside. Crawford stepped back, but McKee caught his gloved hand with her bare one.

He started to yank his hand away, then paused when he saw the intensity in her eyes.

“I don’t lie to people anymore,” she whispered rapidly to him. “We’re in danger if we stay here — those Mud Larks are beginning to bracket us. In their dim way, I think they’ve sensed what we are, and there’s a man they report to. Get in, for the love of God.”

Crawford opened his mouth, then closed it and obediently stepped up into the coach. The young clerk had thoughtlessly settled himself on the forward-facing seat, where good manners dictated that the lady should sit, and Crawford hesitated, momentarily unsure of where he should seat himself.

McKee poked him in the back.

Even as he made up his mind and sat down beside the clerk on the cracked leather upholstery, Crawford was regretting this whole enterprise. It occurred to him that this woman might well be insane.

Then McKee had got in and pulled the door closed and shaken it until it latched, sitting down across from him as the coach lurched forward. She didn’t seem to mind the seating arrangement. The upholstery and the cloth paneling exhaled smells of old tobacco and stale cooking oil.

“Mud Larks?” asked Crawford in a neutral tone.

“Those children.” McKee was leaning back in the seat and peering slantwise through the window. “The tide’s low right now, they should all be out in the mud, harvesting.” She shook her head. “A boat would have been better than this cab, but I had no warning — we’d have had to get past them to reach the water, and God knows where we would have found a boat for hire.”

“Thieving little gypsies,” put in the young man beside Crawford.

“But I don’t think they can have picked us out,” McKee went on, “especially now, in a coach with so much old emotional cross-stitching in it, and a random stranger’s janglings.” She pulled the little birdcage free with her ungloved hand and peered at the bright-eyed bird, who just blinked around the interior of the coach. “Evidently not.”

“And is that a… Mud Lark?” ventured the young man.

McKee stared across at him. “This is a linnet. Who are you?”

“My name’s Tilling, ma’am, Arnold—”

“Excellent. I’m Lady Wishfort and this is Mr. Petulant.” Crawford recognized the names as characters from Congreve’s play The Way of the World, but he was embarrassed that she had chosen the names of villains.

“Actually,” he said hastily, “my name is”—he couldn’t remember the first name of the play’s hero—“is Mr. Mirabell.” He added, “And this is Lady Millamant,” giving McKee the name of the heroine.

But this wasn’t a time for nonsense. He cleared his throat and looked across at McKee. “You said they might … sense what we are? Er … what are we?”

The windows were in shadow for a few seconds, and the knocking and rattling of the coach was louder, and Crawford realized that they were passing under the Temple Bar arch.

McKee seemed to relax. “Were you too drunk to remember that thing you saved us from, on Waterloo Bridge seven years ago? It was … angry seems too pale a word, too human … about our relations with members of its family. Well, jealous, in your case. Girard presumably loved you.”

Crawford winced. In spite of himself, he was remembering things his parents had told him. “My mother and father,” he said hesitantly, “were kin by marriage, or said they were, to…” He laughed uneasily. “Well, they said it was to a species of vampire, actually. I don’t think—”

“That would have been before about 1820?”

He nodded, feeling nauseated again with the smell and motion of the carriage. He was peripherally aware of Arnold Tilling’s stare.

“That’s likely why the creature found your family,” said McKee. “The vampires were gone for about thirty years, and then about fifteen years ago somebody must have invited one back and blooded it.” She gave him an appraising look. “You probably resemble your parents in some way these things sense and remember, like the smell of your soul or something.”

What she was saying fit in with things he recalled his parents saying, and in spite of her outlandish statements, Crawford heard the quiet assurance of sincerity in her voice, and he gave a sigh that seemed to deflate him. He was looking away from her at the bird as he asked her, “And they hate us?”

Arnold Tilling apparently took him to be addressing the bird, for he raised his eyebrows and stared with some evident anxiety at the little cage.

McKee said, “They hate us because the ones they adopt loved us — if only in a brief, token way sometimes! They see the ones they adopt as having been part of our families, and these things don’t want them to be part of any family but their own. So they kill as many members of the plain human family as they can reach. You and I added to their burdens, with Johanna.” She laughed bleakly. “It would powerfully inconvenience them, Mr. Mirabell, if you and I were to marry and have lots more children.”

Crawford could feel his face stiffen, and he kept his eyes on the caged bird.

“Not,” added McKee after a pause, “of course, that you’d ever consider marrying a onetime prostitute.” Crawford heard her shift on the seat, and then she went on brightly, “Have your wife and the other son come back, ever, since their deaths? Have you seen them again? It would be at night.”

“No,” whispered Crawford.

“Well, they did die on the river, after all, so their ghosts are probably safe in the common crowd that infests the water. Mr. Tilling, you remember how bad the river smelled four years ago? The Great Stink?”

Crawford, still staring at the bird, felt the young man beside him nod jerkily.

“A saturation of ghosts, that was. More the result of cholera than the cause of it! They seem to decay in an organic way, you see, and if the concentration of them is high enough—”

Arnold Tilling lunged half out of his seat and yanked on the cord that rang the bell beside the driver. “I’ve only just,” he babbled, “only just remembered!” He was already gripping the inner door handle as the coach rocked and slowed. “I need to — business at…”—he crouched to peer out the grimy window—“at the Old Bailey this morning. It’s been lovely spending time with—”

Then he had got the door open and was already leaning out over the pavement. Cold river-scented air whisked through the coach.

A front wheel grated against the curb, and Tilling evidently decided that the vehicle had slowed enough for jumping.

When he was gone — perhaps falling, from the clattering sound of it — McKee gripped the door lintel and leaned out, squinting up toward the driver. “Carry on!” she called, and the coach wobbled and lurched forward again.

“Did he,” Crawford asked when she had pulled the door closed and sat down again, “break his leg?”

“Why, do you treat humans too?”

“Never. God looks after them, or claims to.”

“Ultimately, I suppose. Are you and God — at odds?”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other for several seconds, and then Crawford said, “Have you seen your daughter—”

“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.”

CHAPTER THREE

SIX 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.

She was still unmarried at the age of thirty-one, living with her mother and two of her three siblings in a house in Albany Street just two streets from Regent’s Park, and some of her friends thought this work was perilous to her own innocence and virtue; her brother Gabriel had written a poem in which a prostitute was described as: a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul…

If she was feeling facetious, she would sometimes reply to their misgivings with a quote from Emma Shepherd’s An Outstretched Hand to the Fallen—“the purer, the more ignorant of vice the lady is who seeks them, the greater the influence she has”—but to herself she could admit that there probably wasn’t an inmate in the house as much in need of redemption as herself.

She had found a refuge in her volunteer residency work here, at least for one fortnight every two or three months, and Reverend Oliver, the warden, had shown her some tricks for “keeping the devils out,” as he put it — the iron-barred decorative openings in the garden wall, the mirrors in the entry hall, the garlic in all the window boxes.

Her sister, Maria, was doing work for the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, and possibly finding similar protections there. Christina hoped so — Maria would never discuss such things, and in fact had never referred to that evening seventeen years ago in a twilit field, when the two of them had given Greek funeral honors to their father’s temporarily buried little black statue.

Christina had lately written a long poem about a girl who surrenders to supernatural temptation, to her ruin, and her sister who rescues her by exposing herself to the same perils. The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems.

Christina had restored the little statue — rendered inert, she had believed then — to its usual perch on her father’s shelf when she had returned from her visit to Maria in the country, and her father had never mentioned the thing again. He had died nine years later, and his last words before he hiccuped into his handkerchief and choked and expired had been Ah Dio, ajuatami Tu! Which meant, roughly, God help me! Their mother, though grieving, had gathered up all the copies in the house of his book, Amor Platonica, and burned them, along with the unpublished notes he’d made on the Kabalistic idea of the transmigration of souls. Nobody, not even Christina’s skeptical brother William, had asked why.

Christina had dreamed of her father since his death: always in the dream he was sitting across a table from her in a small room lit by candles, talking earnestly; but she couldn’t make out the words in his droning monologue. After a few minutes, she would lean forward and watch his lips intently and concentrate, and he would become visibly alarmed — apparently at the prospect of her comprehending his speech, which she realized he was unable to halt — and he would lean across the table and stick his fingers into her ears, so that she could no longer hear his voice, though she could see his lips still moving helplessly.

Always she lived with a conviction that at the age of fourteen she had brought a curse on her family by quickening that little statue with her blood.

Neither Christina nor Maria had married; their brother Gabriel was more stubborn and had married two years ago, at the age of thirty-two — his wife had borne him a dead daughter shortly afterward and was now, God help her, very ill herself. William had been engaged, in spite of Christina’s oblique warnings — and Gabriel’s too, she suspected — but he had canceled the engagement in bewilderment when the young lady insisted that it should be an entirely celibate marriage.

Amor Platonica indeed, thought Christina now as at last she crouched to pick up the sheet of paper. The young lady had not perhaps been as unreasonable as William had thought.

The paper was a page from a story she recognized. She had written it out last year and had submitted it to Thackeray’s Cornhill magazine, but after it was rejected, and she reread it, she had found herself sickened by William’s comment that it was the best story she’d ever written — because, though it had been her hand that had held the pen, she was now convinced that she was not the one who had conceived and composed it.

She had burned it — but since late December she had found her hand writing it out again, in moments when her mind strayed from whatever she’d meant to write.

Its title was “Folio Q,” and she suspected the Q was meant to indicate the German word quelle, source. It was about a man who didn’t dare look into mirrors, and instead imposed his own face onto the people he loved.

She suspected that the actual author was her uncle, John Polidori, who had killed himself in 1821, forty-one years ago. It was clear that he had not, after all, been laid to rest when she and Maria had temporarily buried the little statue.

She glanced at the handwritten page — then stepped to the window for better light, her heart beating more rapidly, for this newest page was a scene that had not been in the story as she had originally written it.

When she finished reading the page, she stepped to the desk and slapped around among the long galley proof sheets, for the handwritten page ended in midsentence — there was, though, no subsequent page.

But she needed to find out how the scene ended. Gabriel needed to know.

I could sit down and hold a pen over a blank sheet, she thought, and open my mind to him, deliberately this time, instead of inadvertently. He could write another page, or several.

All at once her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Yes, she thought excitedly, I’ll give him my hand, let him in just to that extent, just for a little while…

Then she clutched the crucifix on the rope around her waist, and for a moment she wished she were Catholic instead of Anglican, and that the rope was a rosary, so that she could pray to the Virgin for help — for she had sensed that her sinful eagerness was reciprocated from some direction, requited. She couldn’t say an Our Father right now — ever since the age of fourteen she had instinctively feared the all-seeing God of the Old Testament — and even Christ would not shelter a soul who couldn’t bear to entirely relinquish its one most precious sin … but the Virgin Mary might understand…

She shook off the thought — heretical Papist superstition! — and tore the handwritten page into strips and then into tiny fragments and tossed them into the cold fireplace.

She gathered the galley proofs into a stack, the corrected pages facedown on top of the uncorrected ones, then folded the stack and tucked it into the valise beside the desk. She would have to get another of the sisters to assume her duties today and find someone to take the last few days of her scheduled residence — but she needed to see Gabriel immediately.

She glanced at the closet where her street clothes were hung, then impatiently shook her head. There wasn’t time. She hefted the valise, opened the door, and her heels echoed in the empty dormitory as she hurried past the rows of empty beds on her way out to the carriage lane by the stables.

IN THE WEST END, northwest of Waterloo Bridge and the open market at Covent Garden, seven narrow streets met from all directions in a confusion of carriages and wagons and omnibuses below the wedge-shaped buildings that framed an irregular open space. Earl Street stretched east and west, and its balconies and awnings and the hats of the pedestrians on the pavement were lit with the morning sun, while only the chimney pots and roofs of the other streets stood free of the chilly shadows that made the old women around the bakery shops below pull their shawls more tightly around their shoulders. A smoky beam of sunlight crossed the crowded square, occasionally reaching through gaps in the traffic to touch the stone circle where there had once stood a pillar with six sundials on it. The junction had long been known as Seven Dials, for the streets and buildings themselves were said to make a seventh sundial for those who could read it.

Through the crowds of cartwheeling children and adolescent thieves in corduroy trousers and black caps, a peculiar couple shuffled to a corner on the west side. Though the man’s hair and beard were gray as ashes, his shoulders were broad under his flannel coat, and his step was springy — but when his dwarfish companion hesitated at a wide curbside puddle, he crouched and braced himself and lifted it with both hands, then shuffled carefully through the puddle to put the burden down on the pavement with a whoosh of exhaled steam.

The little person was draped in a voluminous Chesterfield overcoat and a baggy slouch hat, with a scarf wrapped around its neck and face, and though now it hopped out of the way of a couple of sprinting boys, its eyes weren’t visible. Long shirtsleeves covered its hands, but in its right hand, half hidden behind the curtain of a lapel, it gripped a violin with a bow clipped to the neck.

Now with its sleeve-shrouded left hand the little figure plucked the bow free, and raised the violin and tucked the chin rest into its scarf and skated the bow over the strings — the hidden fingers of its right hand slid up and down the neck, and the instrument produced a hoarse seesawing note.

The gray-haired man nodded impatiently. “What does it look like?” he snapped. His lip was curled into a perpetual sneer by a scar that ran down his jaw.

He was squinting around at the people hurrying past or slouched against the buildings, and at last he saw the person he was looking for — an old man in a floppy hat and a formal but tattered black coat on the far side of Monmouth Street, his gloved hands holding a broom as if it were a drum major’s baton.

“This way,” said the gray-haired man, starting forward.

The violin emitted a downward-sliding note, but the little person holding it scuttled along after him.

At the corner the old man with the broom had stepped out onto the crushed gravel of the street, waving his broom to halt the horses of an approaching beer wagon, and then he proceeded to sweep the slushy top layer of gravel aside so that three businessmen in bowler hats could cross the street without getting their shoes too muddy. On the far side they paused to give him money, and then, visibly surprised, paused for a little longer while the old man reached into a pocket and gave them change.

He dodged and splashed his way back to the corner where the mismatched couple waited, and he didn’t look at the short figure but grinned at the gray-bearded man.

“Stepping out, Mr. Trelawny?” he said.

Trelawny nodded and handed him a gold sovereign. “I want it all back,” he said.

The crossing sweeper nodded judiciously as if this was an uncommon but not unheard-of transaction, and from his pocket produced two ten-shilling pieces. “There you go, a pound for a pound. I’ll just switch brooms.”

He hobbled to a nearby druggist’s shop with red and purple glass jars in the window; a boy crouched in the recessed entryway beside another broom, and the old man took it and left the one he’d been using.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” said Trelawny dutifully when the old fellow had returned.

“But the old broom knows all the coroners,” returned the old crossing sweeper with a cackle.

Trelawny’s scarred lip kinked in a tired smile at the exchange.

Trelawny glanced left and right at the coaches rattling past on the street, then suddenly darted out in the wake of a fast-moving hansom cab. The old crossing sweeper followed him nimbly, sweeping Trelawny’s boot prints out of the wet road surface.

On the pavement behind them, the dwarf in the slouch hat and overcoat swiveled its covered head in all directions and sawed shrill notes on the violin.

On the far side of the street, Trelawny looked back and couldn’t even see his diminutive onetime companion.

“Well done,” he said to the old man. “You … don’t get into trouble over this?”

The crossing sweeper laughed. “I may be a prodigal son, but I’m still a son. And how should I refuse crossing to,” he added, pointing at his own throat and then at Trelawny’s, “the bridge himself?”

Trelawny pursed his lips irritably at the reminder, but he nodded and hurried away up Queen Street, the narrowest of the streets that met at the Seven Dials.

He remembered this area of the City as it had been in the late 1830s, before the track for New Oxford Street had been leveled through the tangled courts and densely packed houses of the St. Giles rookery. He smiled and softly hummed an old song as he hurried along the crowded pavement, thinking of streets and houses that were just memories now — Carrier Street, with Mother Dowling’s undiscriminating lodging house… Buckeridge Street, where lords and vagabonds mingled in Joe Banks’s Hare and Hounds public house… Jones Court off Bainbridge Street, where Trelawny had once drunkenly surprised a roomful of his enemies by riding a donkey into their midst…

Trelawny’s eyes were relaxed in a wide-focus stare, and his hands swung loosely at his sides, the fingers slightly spread. He stepped into an alley on his right, and though there was scarcely six feet of pavement between the windows and doors of the buildings on either side, dozens of figures moved in the shadows. Many were young children huddled around adults who might be their parents and who appeared to be offering broken trinkets for sale on tables set up against the black brick walls, but most of the inhabitants of the alley seemed to be idlers, men who were of working age but who had no evident occupation.

As Trelawny strode toward a door at the far end of the alley, two of these men stepped into his way.

“Ho, Mahomet,” drawled the shorter one, “first visit was free.” His gray felt top hat might have been salvaged from the river, and his blackened toes stuck out from the ragged edge of his pavement-length coat. “Second visit costs money.”

His companion, skeletally thin in the remains of a frock coat, exposed toothless gums in a grin. “Fork over your purse, Ahmed.”

The man opened his coat with one hand to show a long knife in the other.

On his previous visit to this place, Trelawny had asked directions in Turkish from one of the immigrant residents; and though he had been born in Cornwall, his face and hands were indelibly tanned by years of Mediterranean sun, and the local residents had evidently concluded that he was some species of Arab.

Trelawny took an apparently inadvertent half step forward, his open hands raised in front of his shoulders as if to assure the men of his passivity — he was nearly seventy years old, and he let his lined face sag in an expression of senile dismay—

— And then his right arm straightened in an instantaneous blow that drove the heel of his hand into the thin man’s shoulder; the collarbone broke with an audible click and the man dropped to the pavement as if shot.

In the same motion, Trelawny dove forward in a fencer’s lunge and slammed his right fist into the shorter man’s belly; as the man doubled over, Trelawny recovered forward and gave him a slap across the ear that sent him spinning into the wall. Muffled laughter or coughing sounded from the people in the shadows around the combatants.

Swearing in Turkish just because of the reminder, Trelawny hurried to the door at the end of the alley and drew a knife of his own, and he slipped the blade between the door and the jamb to lift the inner bar.

When he had stepped into the low-ceilinged room beyond and pushed the door closed and latched behind him, a black-bearded man in an interior archway lowered a pistol. Daylight, reflected down through holes in several overhead ceilings and the roof, glittered on gold teeth as the man smiled.

“You come unseen?” he said, speaking English with a Turkish accent.

Trelawny was still holding the knife. “Yes, Abbas. Well, a couple of your hooligans out front are hurting, but I left Miss B. in the Seven Dials.”

“Ah. Blinded by the crossing sweeper who gives change and keeps only a ha’penny.”

“Blinded on the occasions when he gives back the payment entire,” said Trelawny, “and then uses his Lady Godiva broom, his Rapunzel broom.”

These references were clearly lost on the other man, but his smile widened. “I will not give back payment for the Greek boat, beyond doubt.”

It was clearly a hint. Trelawny nodded and with his left hand fetched a purse from his waistcoat pocket. He tossed it to Abbas, who caught it in a hand missing several fingers.

The Turk hefted it, then turned and spoke to someone behind him; a moment later Trelawny heard footsteps pounding away up wooden stairs, and he knew that a semaphore signal would be sent from the rooftop of this house, relayed by flags waved on other rooftops across the City, to a man on London Bridge, who would signal a crewman on a cargo boat now laboring up the Thames. The crewman would shortly be diving overboard and swimming to the docks by the Billingsgate fish market.

Abbas sat down on the damp boards of the floor and picked up a bottle. “You wait so long until perhaps it is too late.”

Trelawny sat down cross-legged near the door and stuck his knife upright in the floor beside him. The house smelled of mildew and olive oil and spinach cooking. “I wanted to be sure this was the right boat. I don’t kill innocent people.”

“Anymore.”

“Anymore,” Trelawny agreed.

“Betrayal, in the other hand,” said his companion as he twisted the cork from the bottle, “is good, eh? These in the boat are your — your allies long ago.” He took a deep gulp of the liquor and smiled as he held the bottle out toward Trelawny. “For them you killed … how many Turkish peoples on Euboea, in the Greeks’ revolution? Children and women too?”

Trelawny took a mouthful of the liquor — it was arrack, harsh and warming. “Many,” he said after he had swallowed it. “As many, probably, as you killed Greek women and children in the Morea. But I have renounced the gods I sought then, to whom I made that blood sacrifice. Now,” he said, waving in the direction of the river, “I hinder them.”

Remembering the man he had hit outside, he rubbed his own crooked collarbone, wondering if the stony knot in his throat next to it was bigger than it used to be. It did seem to be. Nevertheless, he thought uneasily, I do hinder them.

Abbas nodded several times cheerfully. “And we help, when you pay us. But why, old enemy, do you not work with the Carbonari? They would fight these old gods for nothing, for even paying you.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Trelawny, rocking his knife free. He tucked it back into his sleeve and lithely straightened his legs and stood up. “Maybe I just don’t like Italians.”

Abbas tapped his own chest. “And you like Turks?”

“I suppose I don’t really like anybody. Do you mind if I vacate your premises by the back way? Your injured neighbors out front may have found reinforcements.”

“You leave peace in your wake, now, always. Yes, go away by the back.”

Trelawny nodded and stepped past the sitting man and, skirting a kitchen in which several robed women huddled over a smoking black stove, climbed through a glassless window in the hallway. He was now in a long unroofed space too narrow even to be called an alley — a gap where two crumbling buildings didn’t quite meet — and short boards were wedged everywhere between the walls like rungs of a three-dimensional ladder. Any number of destinations could be reached by climbing in one direction or another, even downward into ancient ruptured cellars, and Trelawny began pulling himself up toward the right, toward the shingle eaves and rain gutters that were in sunlight far overhead, knowing that he could get to a rooftop in Earl Street this way, and from there to a flight of lodging house stairs that would lead him down to the Earl Street pavement and the Seven Dials, where the diminutive Miss B. was undoubtedly waiting for him in front of the druggist’s shop where he had left her.

She would be angry. It wouldn’t matter much now, while the sun was up, but he wasn’t looking forward to the night, when she would be … bigger.

CHAPTER FOUR

AT LOW TIDE there was a narrow sandy beach between the embankment wall and the river in the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, and a gang of ragged children had somehow found it and were wading out into the icy water and bending to sift the sand through their blackened fingers.

Standing on an iron balcony a hundred feet above, shaded from the bright winter sun by an overhanging roof, Dante Gabriel Rossetti puffed on a cigar and stoically watched several large sheets of paper, bobbing on the ripples out of reach of the scavenging children, as they were swept out of the sunlight and into the shadows under the bridge.

He was wearing baggy houndstooth check trousers and a buttoned-up waistcoat under a black wool coat, but the wind — which had carried the drawings so far out over the river to the west that they had only now disappeared from sight — seemed to be finding the gaps between all the buttons.

And in spite of the cold, the Thames here smelled like a cesspool, largely because the ancient Fleet Ditch, a subterranean channel now, flowed into the river beside Blackfriars Bridge. God only knew how those little street Arabs in the shallows below kept from being poisoned by the sewage — They must build up an immunity gradually, he thought, like Mithridates of Pontus who was said to have deliberately acquired a cumulative tolerance to all the poisons of his day.

The thought made him shift around to look over his shoulder back into the parlor, and in fact he didn’t see the slim figure of his wife on the couch. Probably she had gone back to bed with the laudanum bottle. They were to go out to dinner with a friend tomorrow night, and she would conserve her meager strength for that.

Their bedroom was always foul with the metallic reek of laudanum. Since her miscarriage in May of last year, Lizzie had needed ever-increasing doses of the opium-in-alcohol medicine to fight her fevers and insomnia. Already today she had taken twenty drops of it, to counter the fit that had shaken both of them awake at the ungodly hour of six this morning. The medicine had worked, and it was now presumably helping her back to sleep, but Gabriel was irremediably wide awake.

Lizzie would be awake again in a few hours. He wondered if she would remember throwing his drawings off the balcony.

He pitched the cigar out toward the river and shuffled back through the French doors into the relative dimness inside, and, before stepping to the bedroom to check on her, he looked at the framed watercolors hung around the blue-tile-fronted fireplace. They were all Lizzie’s — his own work was in the studio down the hall — and on this cold malodorous morning he saw her pictures as lifeless, the figures blank faced and awkwardly proportioned.

From across many years he remembered a disturbing pencil sketch of a rabbit, drawn by his sister when she’d have been about fourteen, and he absently touched the revolver he always carried in a holster on his right hip.

Flickers of reflected sunlight from the river played across the high blue-painted plaster ceiling, making Lizzie’s pictures look as drowned as his drawings of Miss Herbert and Annie Miller would soon be.

The room smelled of cigar, the Fleet Ditch, and garlic.

He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it quietly, but Lizzie was not in the big four-poster bed — she was sitting at the desk by the open river-facing window, hunched so closely over whatever she was doing that her wavy red hair lay tumbled across the desk and hid her face and hands.

“Guggums,” he began, using his pet name for her, but he stepped back when she gave a kind of whispered inhaled shriek and tore a paper she’d apparently been writing on.

Her face when she looked up was pale and thin, but her eyes on him were enormous.

“I’m sorry!” she said hoarsely; then she added, “Walter says your sisters are on their way over here.”

Clearly it wasn’t a visit from Christina and Maria that she was sorry about — though this was an inconsiderately early hour — and he was careful not to seem to be hurrying as he moved to the desk.

She had laid out a large page torn from a sketch pad, and it was covered with lines of penciled writing — passages of her own neat handwriting alternating with a wavering loopy script, the source of which, Gabriel soon realized, must be the pencil that stood upright in a little disk that sat on the paper. Gabriel reached out slowly — Lizzie didn’t stop him — and pushed the disk, and it slid smoothly across the paper, leaving a penciled line. Apparently the disk rolled on confined ball bearings.

“You promised Doctor Acland that you’d give this up. He says it makes you sicker.”

“Séances,” said Lizzie weakly, throwing herself back in the chair. “This isn’t—”

“Oh, don’t, Gug — you know he didn’t mean the groups, the hand-holding! You know he meant — talking to dead people!”

She gripped the arms of the chair and got halfway to her feet, then collapsed back, panting.

Her eyes were closed, and her eyelids were wrinkled. “Who can I trust,” she whispered, “besides dead people?”

He opened and closed his mouth several times before he spoke. “I’ve done everything I — we’re practically on the river — and—”

“And the garlic and the mirrors,” she said, “and your gun. I know.”

Gabriel looked around the musty room in frustration, then snapped, “You’re too weak to go out to La Sablonniere tomorrow night. I’ll call on Swinburne and tell him it’s off. Mrs. Birrell can make us some soup.”

“I’ll be rested. I should go out sometimes.” Her fingers touched the torn paper, then quickly retreated. “Please.”

Gabriel exhaled and shook his head in reluctant acquiescence. “If you’re better by then. If! But no more of this — this necromancy.” He picked up the paper and the pencil disk. “Let poor Walter rest in peace. You owe him that.” He turned on his heel and left the room, ignoring her weak protests and kicking the door shut behind him.

He tucked the pencil disk into his pocket and squinted at the paper.

Walter was Walter Deverell, who had died eight years earlier. Deverell had been a close friend, a year older than Gabriel and a teacher at the Government School of Design, and it had been he who discovered Lizzie in a milliner’s shop near Leicester Square. Deverell had immediately hired her as a model, and Gabriel and his group of young painters — who called themselves, a bit self-consciously, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — had all soon hired her too, to model for various of their paintings.

Gabriel had long suspected that Lizzie would rather have married Deverell than himself, and when he thought about Deverell — which he tried not to do — he had to suppress a nasty satisfaction that the man had died when he did, at the age of twenty-six.

Since Deverell’s death Lizzie had two or three times contacted his ghost at séances, or claimed that she had. But — Gabriel hooked his reading glasses out of his breast pocket and sat down on the couch — Gabriel had never until now seen a transcript of any of those conversations.

At the top of the sheet of paper, Walter, are you there? was written three times in her clear hand. Below the last one was a meandering and unbroken pencil line; Gabriel managed to decipher it as,

there fair ne’er

Well, thought Gabriel sourly, that’s well said.

Lizzie’s handwriting followed it with, What shook me awake this morning?

Gabriel could only read the next line as,

parnassus has its flowers

Very poetical, Walter, he thought. The flowers on Mount Parnassus woke her up, of course.

Lizzie had followed it with, Where can we be safe?

And the pencil oracle had scrawled,

dark river you come soon

Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?

Below that Lizzie had written, Must I die soon?

— to which the meandering line replied,

or never

Lizzie countered, You know why I can’t.

— and Deverell’s faint handwriting followed with,

worse for both you if you stay

Gabriel started to get to his feet, then slumped back. It would do no good to try to reason with Lizzie right now.

“Damn you, Walter,” he whispered furiously, “you want her with you still?”

Lizzie’s next line was, I can’t.

And the last line on the sheet was Deverell’s:

ask his sisters are there in your soon

Gabriel tossed the paper away; it swooped back and forth and settled on the carpet.

According to spiritualist lore, a ghost could only be invited to reach up from the river and participate in this sort of written communication — they couldn’t be compelled; it had to be voluntary. Walter was apparently as poisonously eager to converse as she was.

If converse was the proper word. Morbid malignant gibberish. And Gabriel couldn’t see that the ghost had said that Maria and Christina were coming here.

He got to his feet and walked down the hall to his studio, stepping around stacks of books along the way. When he had married Lizzie almost two years ago — after so long an engagement that everyone, including her, had assumed he didn’t mean to go through with it — he had got the landlord to cut a door through to the next house in the row, connecting Gabriel’s old bachelor rooms on the first floor of Number 13 Chatham Place to the corresponding floor of Number 14. He had moved his bed — the bed he had been born in — to the newly acquired bedroom where Lizzie now sat, but he hadn’t shifted his studio.

Stepping now into the wide, high-ceilinged room, he let his eyes play over the canvases leaning in stacks and the sketches tacked to the walls.

He owed three paintings to the estate of a deceased patron — three paintings or the return of the 714 pounds the patron had advanced to him — but all he had been doing was portraits of Lizzie. It was Lizzie’s sad face in every picture, looking in every direction but straight at the viewer.

How could she still be in love with a man who was dead, and who furthermore could no longer frame a coherent sentence? But Deverell was fixed forever in her memory as he had been in 1854, young and almost ridiculously handsome — while Gabriel’s hair, though still curly and black, had begun to recede, and he wasn’t as slim as he had been in 1854, and he believed his trim goatee gave him dignity, but his youthful Byronic looks were gone.

He inhaled the smells of linseed oil and turpentine and crossed the bare wood floor to the window wall, where he stared out at a string of barges moving downstream, and a low-in-the-water sloop with filled sails moving slowly the opposite way, and the smokestacks of the iron foundry on the river’s south shore. At least, he thought with a wry smile, I have the advantage of being alive.

But if she had married Deverell, came a sudden and unwelcome thought, while she was still a virgin, Deverell would still be alive, and she wouldn’t be dying.

The doorbell in the hall clanged then, and he was grateful for the interruption as he hurried to the stairs; already he could hear Christina’s voice below, and he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Now both of his sisters were clumping up the stairs, stout Maria in the rear — and he frowned in irritation and mild alarm to see that they were somehow both dressed as nuns.

“Sisters!” he called down in greeting — adding, with somewhat forced cheer, “Have you come to save our souls?”

“Not primarily yours,” said Christina.

In the shadows of the stairwell she was backlit from below, and not for the first time he noted the planes of her narrow face, framed by the dark hair parted in the middle and swept back. He had twice used her as a model for the Virgin Mary, and her present expression made him wish he could stop her right now and sketch her for a painting of Mary ascending to the upper room in Jerusalem to meet with the apostles after the Crucifixion.

“Where is Lizzie?” asked Christina quietly when she had stepped up beside him.

“In the bedroom,” said Gabriel, “sleeping at last, I hope — she had a fit at dawn, then threw a dozen of my drawings into the river. We can talk in the studio without … disturbing her.”

Maria had made it to the top of the stairs, puffing, and now sidled around the couch to pick up the sheet Gabriel had tossed down.

“Automatic writing?” she asked.

“Ah — she does it with a sort of sliding pencil device—”

“Bring it along,” said Christina, starting down the hall.

GABRIEL CLEARED BOXES AND brushes off a couple of stools for his sisters, but he remained standing, hoping the light from the glass window-wall at his back would make any facial expressions harder to see.

Both women were studying the pencil lines on the sheet.

“Walter Deverell said you’d be dropping by,” Gabriel remarked lightly, waving at the paper. “Why are you two dressed for the convent?”

“I came straight home from the Magdalen Penitentiary,” said Christina, “and Maria was on her way to All Saints. I suppose you understood Walter to be referring to you and Lizzie, here, where he writes, ‘worse for both you if you stay.’”

“I suppose I did, if indeed that’s Walter, and not just Lizzie’s imagination. I thought you were scheduled at Magdalen for another … two days, was it?”

“Yes.” Christina took a deep breath and exhaled. “But I seem to have done a bit of automatic writing myself. ‘Folio Q’ won’t stop writing itself.”

Maria closed her eyes and shook her head.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows at Christina and made a beckoning motion with his hand.

There were tears in Christina’s eyes. “It’s Uncle John who’s writing it, I’m nearly sure, and I don’t think it’s voluntary on his part. I think it’s his — his dreams, if such creatures dream. And he says—” Her voice faltered.

Maria spoke up. “Sembra che Lizzie sia di nuovo in dolce attesa,” which was Italian for Apparently Lizzie is expecting again.

Gabriel was glad that he had chosen to stand against the light, for he could feel his face chill and he assumed he had gone pale.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “Do you think I didn’t learn, from the first one? I’ve admitted you were right, and — since May, we haven’t—”

Christina started to say something, but Maria interrupted: “Why did she throw your pictures into the river?”

Gabriel was still frowning. “Jealousy. Baseless. Old pictures of models I don’t use anymore.”

“Stunners,” said Maria with a wan smile, using Gabriel’s term for beautiful women.

Gabriel nodded in dismissal of the brief diversion and turned to Christina. “Uncle John,” he said clearly, “and poor old Walter too, if that’s what he meant there, are wrong. The dead chaps are, in this, unreliable.”

Lizzie’s recent words came back to him—Who can I trust besides dead people?

“I’m sorry,” whispered Christina, staring at the paint-dappled wooden floor.

Gabriel understood that she wasn’t apologizing for anything she’d said or done today.

So did Maria. “You were only fourteen,” she said. “And Papa, God rest his soul, deliberately led you into it.”

Gabriel wavered, then stepped forward and briefly gripped Christina’s shoulder. “I would have done the same,” he said. “I did, eventually.”

And so did my poor Lizzie, he thought.

“If we could find it,” said Christina, without looking up, “and destroy it — I promised him I would grind it to powder and sift it into the sea—”

Gabriel stared at his sister with mingled sympathy and cynicism — after their father’s death, the three of them had searched every corner of the old house in Charlotte Street, but they had not found the tiny black statue; and Gabriel wondered if Christina would be so resolute to destroy the thing if she were actually to have it again.

“Prayer,” said Maria, “is our only hope now.”

“And the temporal measures,” said Christina with a sigh. “Garlic, mirrors, and celibacy.”

Gabriel was still angry that his resolve — his selfless resolve! — had been called into question, and by dead men. “Well, if Uncle John thinks—”

“He isn’t really our mother’s brother,” said Maria. “Poor damned John Polidori is just the latest mask — a suffering, half-alive mask! — that this thing is currently wearing. It’s Gog and Magog, the eternal enemy of God’s kingdom, from the prophecies in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation.”

Gabriel saw Christina’s face go blank, and he quickly said, “No doubt, no doubt! Or something of that general description, I’m sure.” Maria looked away, so he was able to send a warning frown to Christina.

“If we’d see you in church occasionally—” began Maria, but Christina interrupted her.

“We could be sure it was you,” she said, “since I don’t believe Uncle John would venture into a church. You remember the drawing you did when you and poor Lizzie were in Paris on your honeymoon? The two couples in the forest?”

Gabriel did indeed remember it. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman in medieval clothing, visibly astonished at coming face-to-face with exact duplicates of themselves.

“I called it How They Met Themselves,” he said cautiously. “It was a study in—”

“It was a prophecy,” said Christina. “Forgive me, Gabriel, but I wonder if Lizzie would agree that the two of you have been celibate since May.”

Gabriel stepped back toward the window, perhaps to keep from raising his hand to his sister.

“I,” he said hoarsely, “know you’ve never approved of her — but she would not ever—”

“She would have thought it was you,” wailed Maria, raising her hands halfway to her face as if she meant to cover her eyes. “You knew — when you drew that picture! — that creatures of our uncle’s sort can take on the appearance of their hosts.”

Gabriel was shaking his head and had started to speak, when the window glass rattled and the timbers creaked as a reverberating boom rolled over the house.

His sisters had both stood up and were staring past him out the window, so he spun around — a plume of black smoke was churning and swelling over the water of the Thames a hundred yards out from the shore, and pieces of debris were spinning upward across the view of the buildings on the opposite shore.

“Was that a boat?” asked Maria breathlessly.

Gabriel shrugged. “What else?” He wondered if it had been the heavy-laden sloop he had noticed a couple of minutes earlier. “Nobody on board will have survived that.”

Down the hall they could hear Lizzie weeping now.

Gabriel turned toward the doorway and hesitated, his teeth bared in indecision. At last, “Help me with her,” he said to his sisters.

Maria nodded and hurried past him, her long black sleeves flapping.

Christina took Gabriel’s arm as they strode behind her, and Christina whispered, “At the Lord Mayor’s Show that time—”

“Hush. You’ll upset them both.”

He should never have told Christina what Lizzie had said then — it had been a little more than nine years ago, in November of ’52, shortly after he and Lizzie had become lovers. They had gone to see the Lord Mayor’s parade in New Oxford Street, and a deformed dwarf beggar had been lurching alongside the parade, pacing the traditional giant wicker figures of Gog and Magog that were being ceremoniously carried down the street, and when the dwarf stumbled and fell near where Lizzie stood, she had run to the little figure and in pity taken it right into her arms — invited it into her bosom! — and even though its face was entirely wrapped in a scarf, the dwarf had somehow managed to bite Lizzie. When Gabriel had pushed the malignant thing away and pulled Lizzie to her feet and said, “Let’s get that bite attended to, Lizzie,” she had shuddered and said to him hoarsely, “Call me Gogmagog.” A moment later she had claimed not to remember having said it — and when he asked her if she knew of the sinister “Goemagot” giant in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regnum Britanniae, who was called Goemagog in Milton’s History of Britain and Gogmagog in Midlands devil legends, she had responded with genuine bafflement — but he had called her Gogmagog for the rest of that day, and the name had soon become the affectionate nickname Guggums.

And now, for the first time, it occurred to Gabriel that Lizzie might have acquired a second vampiric patron, on that day, in addition to his uncle. Her unspecific infirmities had started around then. Could two of the damnable things be sharing her? Uncle John and this Gogmagog thing?

Which of the two might it have been who, in his sisters’ repellent speculation, had congress with Lizzie in Gabriel’s form?

He shuddered and forcefully dismissed the thought and took Christina’s arm to hurry her along.

When Gabriel and Christina arrived at the bedroom doorway, Lizzie and Maria were huddled in the far corner over the crib Gabriel had bought last year in anticipation of the baby who had been stillborn. Lizzie had never let him get rid of it. Maria had one arm around Lizzie and was murmuring.

Lizzie was sobbing and shaking her head. “Did you shoot at him, Gabriel?” she whined. “Look, you woke the baby!”

And for just a flickering split second, Gabriel thought he saw a tiny figure in the crib, a dark little thing with long fingers and enormous eyes; then, even before he could shake his head or blink, it was gone.

Maria didn’t move, but she had gone quiet; and beside Gabriel, Christina had audibly caught her breath.

Gabriel swallowed, then managed to say, “The baby’s quiet, now, G — darling. See? Take some more medicine, if you need to, and you should be back in bed.”

Lizzie’s urgency seemed to have evaporated — she stared at the empty crib and then nodded and let Maria help her back to the bed. She sighed and lay back across it, and Gabriel stepped forward and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders, and she closed her eyes. Her eyelids looked like an old man’s knuckles.

Gabriel jerked his head toward the hallway, and his sisters followed him back to the studio. Maria was visibly shaking.

The cloud of black smoke over the river had thinned and drifted west almost out of sight beyond the brick wall of the next house, and several rowboats and a steam launch were arrowing toward the arches of the bridge, no doubt heading for whatever floating debris the river had carried to the east side of it.

Gabriel crossed to a cabinet and reached down a bottle. He waved it at his sisters — Christina nodded energetically and Maria shook her head.

As he carried two filled glasses back to where the women had resumed their seats, he handed one to Christina and asked in a defeated tone, “Very well, who did she imagine I was shooting at?”

Christina gulped the brandy to avoid replying and Maria just stared out the window, but Gabriel knew what the answer was: their uncle. Or conceivably the Gogmagog thing. Lizzie might have mistaken the apparition for her husband the first time — or two — but had apparently not been fooled forever.

Jealous husband, he thought bitterly, shoots at immortal vampire rival.

And then he drained his glass in several eye-watering swallows and went back to refill it, for the thought had occurred to him that the apparition might have taken the form of Walter Deverell.

Christina finished her own glass and, staring out the window, seemed to brace herself. “Soon,” she said levelly, “there may be two phantom infants in that crib.”

For a moment Gabriel wasn’t able to take a deep breath, and then he was panting. “Yes, probably!” he burst out. “But I will shoot him, if I get the chance. I’ve got silver bullets.”

“I wish you didn’t carry that firearm about,” said Maria.

He drew his hand back as if to throw his refilled glass, then just set it down carefully beside the bottle. “William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. “He’ll try to have children — he doesn’t believe any of this.”

“Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.”

“And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped. “He was shot once, though, wasn’t he? Our monstrous uncle, not God. In your story, Christina, your ‘Folio Q.’”

Christina rocked her head back and stared at the high plaster ceiling. “The story took place in Italy, and it concerned a man who didn’t dare look in a mirror. He was threatened by a rival in love, but he let down his guard, and his rival shot him, in the mouth, and yes, it was with a silver bullet; he never really recovered. He died not long afterward, in Venice.” She lowered her head and looked at her siblings. “Papa told me once that he got the little petrified statue in Venice, before he came to England — he said it showed him visions of Mama. And he implied … that the acquiring of it put his soul in peril.”

Maria muttered something doleful in Italian.

Christina went on, “I seem to be — our uncle seems to be — writing a sequel now, in which he’s alive again, in London.”

“We need to read this sequel,” said Gabriel. “I wish you hadn’t burned ‘Folio Q.’”

Christina gave him a stricken look. “I’m sorry, I–I’ve destroyed the new page too! I didn’t think—”

For several long seconds none of them spoke.

At last Gabriel said, gently, “You remember it, though.”

“Yes — yes.”

“And if you write more — if he does, that is — you can save it.” When Christina nodded, he fished Lizzie’s automatic-writing pencil disk out of his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly. “Use this,” he said, “if it will help. I don’t want it in the house.”

Maria frowned, but Christina nodded and gingerly put the thing into the side pocket of her habit.

“And,” Gabriel went on, though it actually made his forehead sweat to say it, “he claims that my wife is with child by … by a vampire wearing my appearance, is that right? Does he actually … mention Lizzie by name?”

Christina sighed and nodded. “Lizzie Siddal.”

“Damn him, her name is Rossetti now, Elizabeth Rossetti.” Gabriel jammed his fists in his coat pockets and paced to the far wall and back, staring around at all the portraits of his wife.

“If she is with child,” he asked finally, “as the ghosts and devils claim — who is the father?”

“You are,” said Christina. She too was pointedly looking at the pictures, not at him. “There’s no other human, no other male, really, in the picture. He took your — when you invited him in, in whatever form he was wearing — along with your blood—” She was blushing, and Maria had turned to face the wall. “‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’” Christina finished quickly, quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet about the effects of lust.

“Er, yes.” Gabriel was blushing himself. “Quite so. Well! In that case we need to catch him and kill him, don’t we? Shoot him with a silver bullet again.” He patted the bulk of the revolver under his waistcoat.

“Catch him?” cried Maria. “You’ll damn your soul simply doing that! And silver bullets will only injure him — you need to find the statue too and destroy that. At least.”

Gabriel flinched at damn your soul, for he had not entirely shed the Catholic beliefs of his youth; but he nodded grimly and went on, “If we — if I — can catch him, injure him, bind him somehow — he’s weak in daylight, according to what I recall of your story, Christina! — we can make him tell us where the statue is.”

He looked squarely at Maria. “How do we catch him, Moony?” he asked, using the nickname she had been given in childhood because of her round face.

“Why do you imagine I would know?”

“You seem to know the cost of it. And you read all of Papa’s manuscripts, burned now, even the ones in Greek and Hebrew — all his occult interpretations of Dante and Pythagoras and the Jewish mystics.”

“It’s ridiculous to think that—”

“Do you know a way, Moony?”

Maria got to her feet and smoothed out the apron of her black habit. “Consider it, Gabriel,” she said earnestly as she moved to step past him. “If Papa knew anything about—”

He stepped in front of her. “But do you know a way?”

Her round face looked up at him from under her folded-back veil. “Gabriel,” she said, “I am a lay member of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, soon to be undertaking my novitiate. I love you, and through you I love Lizzie and any children you have. But if I know a way to catch him, it would be a mortal sin, for all of us, to use it, and therefore I would not reveal it. You know me.” After staring into his eyes for another couple of seconds, she said, “I’ll just go look in on Lizzie,” and again stepped around him.

This time he didn’t block her.

As Maria clumped away down the hall, Gabriel said to Christina, “A clear yes.”

“And a clear no.” She shivered, but Gabriel couldn’t tell what emotion it sprang from. “I believe I could summon him,” she said. “I don’t know about restraining him.”

Gabriel nodded. I imagine I could summon him too, he thought — but in my case it would be the form of a woman who answered the summons.

As before, it would be the image of Lizzie. I wonder if I could shoot a creature wearing that image.

CHAPTER FIVE

BY NOON THE unseasonal east wind had died. With sunset came clouds from the west that hid the rising full moon, and the streetlamps of London were lit early because of a heavy fog that was as much coal smoke as dampness.

Cabs and coaches moved slowly down the streets from one patch of lamplight to the next, the creak and clatter of their passage seeming to echo back more clearly from the housefronts in the opaque night air than they did by daylight.

A slow-moving clarence cab made a wide right turn from Charing Cross Road into New Oxford Street, its two lanterns lighting the driver’s hat and turned-up coat collar and the horse’s flexing back and not much else. A hansom cab would have been faster, but McKee had said that if they were to travel together at night, they must have a vehicle with four walls as well as a roof, and hansom cabs didn’t have a partition in front. Crawford had been happy with the choice, for it let him sit across from her with his silk hat beside him — and he was facing the rear, this time, as good manners dictated.

“I believe the British Museum is ahead of us,” McKee remarked now, peering out at the vague shapes of the buildings looming past on either side. Windows of houses were luminous yellow smears in the angular black silhouettes.

The cab’s windows rattled and the wheels made a loud grinding sound on the crushed stone of the street surface, and Crawford had to lean forward in the dimness of the interior to hear her.

“I don’t know where we are,” he said, trying to remember precisely why he had agreed to this. “Talk louder.”

“My father took me to the British Museum when I was eleven,” she said. He cupped a hand to his ear, and she added, “Oh, for God’s sake, sit over here beside me so I won’t have to shout.”

It seemed, on the whole, ridiculous not to. He nodded and stood up in a crouch and sat down on the forward-facing seat, of which McKee’s crinoline dress occupied more than half. He smelled lavender with the faintest undertone of garlic.

“The, uh, British Museum,” he said.

“Yes. I mainly remember being scared by the Egyptian mummies — I was afraid we might happen to be in there in the moment when the General Resurrection took place, and they’d start to come to life all around us.”

Crawford realized that he was smiling in spite of himself. “Well — on the whole, that would be a festive moment, wouldn’t it? The Second Coming, Jesus arriving to judge the living and the dead? You couldn’t have been much of a sinner at the age of eleven.”

“As opposed to later, you mean. Shall I tell you how I came to be ruined, eight years after that?”

Crawford’s smile had disappeared. “Certainly not, Miss McKee. I think we’re almost at our destination. Do you suppose there’ll be a dinner?”

He had obtained with no trouble from his dog-owning client a note of invitation to the salon, but the note, written on the back of her calling card, simply said, Please welcome into your company John Crawford, a poet, and his guest. No reference to dinner. He had taken McKee’s advice and copied out twenty lines from a middle canto of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, just in case.

She shrugged. “This isn’t my pasture any more than it’s yours. It sounded like more talking than eating — which ought to mean beer, at least. I grew up in the country, in Sudbury. You know it?”

“Certainly.”

“In ’54, when I was nineteen, I was visiting cousins in London; one night we got separated in the crowd in Mayfair. I was dazzled by all the bright gas jets and music and the fine-dressed ladies and gentlemen … as I thought at the time. The elegant scene. And I got lost, and found myself in a dark street with the crowds all somehow gone, and an old woman in an open doorway spoke to me. I told her I’d lost my way and asked her how to get back to Langham Street, where my aunt and cousins lived, though I didn’t know if it was in Soho or Fitzrovia or St. Pancras or what — I’ve heard it’s in Fitzrovia—”

“Yes,” said Crawford.

“—but she swore she knew it and would have her groom escort me back, but first I must come in and have a cup of coffee to take the chill off. I did. The coffee was drugged. When I woke up after noon the next day, I learned that at least one man had visited me. I was kept prisoner for a week and then wholesaled with two other girls to Carpace across the river.” In the dimness he saw her raise one hand and let it fall. “There’s no going back.”

“I’m sorry,” Crawford said stiffly, squinting through the front window into the light-stained fog ahead of the driver. Then he glanced at the pale oval of her face and said, “And … and I’m sorry.”

“Do you have siblings? I don’t remember.”

“No.”

“If I were — your sister, say — what would your feelings be?”

“I’d want to find that old woman who drugged you. I’d want to kill her.” He sat back, wishing he’d brought a flask. “I want to kill her now.”

“That’s something.”

Crawford was startled then by a squeak from her purse — she had evidently brought her bird along. She went on, “I imagine there’ll be sandwiches or relish trays or things of that sort — artistic folk won’t stay if there’s no food or drink at all.”

“Stands to reason,” he agreed. “Haven’t you — sorry, I ought not to ask you personal questions.”

“‘Ought not’?” she said sharply. “‘Personal questions’? Why are we in this cab?”

Crawford inhaled through his teeth and nodded, conceding the point. “To find out what became of our daughter,” he said. “Fair enough. So — haven’t you, now that you’re free of the Carpace woman, tried to contact your family? How many years has it been?”

“It’s been eight years. I ran away from Carpace’s house to the Magdalen Penitentiary four years ago, and I’ve been out of there for two years, in the Hail Mary trade. No, I haven’t tried to approach them. My father is a curate and my mother teaches at the church school … if they’re still alive.” She gave a hitching laugh. “That was a personal question, wasn’t it?”

“They wouldn’t … blame you, surely, for having simply stumbled into a trap.”

“I hope no reasonable person would blame me. No, they’d be saddened by it but overjoyed to see me alive and restored. And I would dearly love to see them again, before they die.” She glanced at Crawford and then away. “But I love them, you see — I think they’re safe from the devil I’ve acquired, as long as I don’t go near them.”

Several seconds went by with just the noise of the cab and the passing blurs of light outside the window glass. “The, uh, Hail Mary trade?” he said finally.

“A veterinarian, and you don’t know the term? Aves.” She sang three lines from the Irish song “Danny Boy”: “‘And if I’m dead, as dead I well may be, / You’ll come and find the place where I am lying, / And kneel and say an ave there for me.’”

“Avis, aves,” said Crawford, nodding. “Birds. The bird business?”

“Exactly. Songbirds. It overlaps with some other trades — gypsy soul-catchers, absinthe-sellers, the eyeglasses men.”

Crawford was curious about these, and about how they overlapped with the songbird trade, but the cab had pulled up in front of one of a row of tall narrow houses; a gas lamp shone beside the door at the top of the steps, and the curtained windows glowed upstairs and downstairs.

“You pay the cabbie and go to the door first,” said McKee. “When they open the door, I’ll join you as you go in.” Seeing his puzzled look, she added, “You and I ought not to be together under a naked night sky.”

“I take your meaning,” said Crawford slowly, remembering their calamitous meeting seven years ago on Waterloo Bridge. What the hell am I doing here, he thought bleakly — but just see it through, see it through. “I’d forgotten.”

McKee caught his arm. “Now I think of it — once we’ve been admitted, let’s stay on opposite sides of the room.”

“What — why? Who am I to talk to?”

“We don’t know who or what might have been invited inside. Did you bring your garlic?”

Crawford touched his waistcoat pocket. “I did, but—”

“So did I. I think we’d be well advised to play this as if we were outdoors. Might be nothing would happen, but just in—”

“Why am I even here?” demanded Crawford — quietly, for the cabbie had stepped down from his perch and was standing outside the door now. “If I’m not to be anywhere near whatever you’re doing?”

“Watch me — if it goes wrong, barge in, devils or no devils.”

Crawford nodded tightly. “Garlic flying. Aye aye.” He picked up his hat and opened the door, wincing at the cold night air, and stepped down to the gritty pavement. He paid the cabbie and then tapped quickly up the steps to the house door.

His knock was answered by a middle-aged man whose old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings indicated that he was a servant; Crawford handed him his hat and the dog owner’s calling card.

The man glanced at the card and looked down the steps to the cab. “And guest, sir?”

Crawford stepped past him into the entry hall and nodded, hearing the cab door slam below. “She, uh, catches cold easily,” he said. “I didn’t want her to stand in the chilly air.”

“Of course, sir. Guests are in the library and sitting room, through those doors.”

Crawford strode toward the indicated doors, and another servant pulled them open. Crawford stepped through, moving quickly to maintain a distance between himself and McKee; and he found that dozens of people in a dimly lit room all now seemed to be staring at him. He nodded vaguely and shuffled away from the clear area of carpet in front of the doors.

It was certainly a large room, with a very high ceiling, though its dimensions were hard to guess since the only illumination was dozens of candles; no, there were several gas jets too, but they were enclosed in thick red glass shades. He could smell coffee and vanilla under a haze of cigar smoke, and he hoped there would be more substantial fare than just coffee and cakes.

An unguessable number of people were sitting in clusters of chairs or standing beside a long table to his left. There were no white ties on the visible gentlemen, and his fretfulness about his own frock coat and cravat abated; but McKee would be coming in behind him in a moment, so he hurried to the farthest ring of chairs. Long curtains indicated tall windows at intervals along the length of the room, and dark paintings were hung with their frames nearly edge to edge all over the walls, extending so high up that surely nobody could ever look at the top several rows, even in daylight.

Looking back, he could see the dim shapes of faces looking after him, but when McKee stepped into the room, they turned toward her. Grateful that he had only momentarily been the object of attention, Crawford sat down in an empty chair in the nearest circle, to the left of a lean, gray-bearded gentleman, on the far side of whom stood a tall woman in what seemed to be a toga.

The old man was staring at him, and Crawford nodded and said quietly, “How do you do?”

“Stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” the old man growled, and he looked away.

On Crawford’s left, a young man in a lacy collar giggled softly and whispered, “That’s Edward John Trelawny, the great friend of Shelley’s.”

“Oh.” The people in the chairs around him seemed to be looking expectantly toward the long table along the wall opposite the curtained windows, but Crawford glanced curiously at the old man on his right.

He had heard of Trelawny. The man had reportedly been a close friend of the poets Byron and Shelley, and a few years ago he had published a sensational memoir of their last days. And Crawford recalled that the man had published an autobiography some thirty years ago, recounting his bloody adventures as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. Crawford remembered hearing that Trelawny had joined Byron in fighting to free Greece from the Turks, and had married a Greek maiden in a cave on Mount Parnassus — perhaps that’s who the tall woman was.

Crawford looked past the young man on his left, peering to see where McKee might have alighted, but he couldn’t make her out in the red-tinted dimness. He wondered uneasily if she had found Carpace.

“I am sorry to announce,” said a woman’s strong voice then from the direction of the table across the room, “that our guest speaker will not be joining us—”

Trelawny snorted, and the woman standing beyond him seemed to stir. Crawford heard exclamations of dismay in German and French from nearby circles. The man to Crawford’s left was now peering at the speaker through a pair of opera glasses.

“—because of a sudden illness encountered on the river this morning. We hope to have her back with us soon.”

Crawford hiked up in his chair to try to get a better view of the speaker — she appeared to be in charge, and McKee had said Carpace was hosting this affair — but he could only see that she was very wide and wore some sort of tall ornamental headdress.

“Therefore,” the woman went on, “we’ll proceed directly to individual recitals and political dialogues.”

Crawford heard the notes of a flute start up somewhere in the middle of the long room, and farther away a man’s voice began singing something dirgelike, and a young woman seated across from Crawford in this ring of chairs waved a sheaf of papers and announced, “If I may, I will read a passage from my Lunar Encomium.”

A portly man beside her stood up and fetched a candle from a nearby table, and then he knelt by her and solicitously held the candle beside her elbow so that she could see the pages.

Trelawny leaned forward while she read the first several lines of her poem, about which Crawford was only able to discern that it was in iambic pentameter, but Trelawny soon leaned back and yawned audibly. None of the other people in the circle took note of it — apparently Trelawny was expected to be rude.

After perhaps a minute, the young woman stopped reciting, and since it was at the end of a line and the man with the candle had wobbled to his feet, Crawford concluded that it was over, but he didn’t clap his hands until several others in the circle did.

The young man to Crawford’s left sighed loudly and said, “Isn’t she marvelous? So very like a gold-lit cloud at dawn.” He beamed expectantly at Crawford.

“Incredibly like,” said Crawford. The young man apparently expected more, so Crawford added, “It’s uncanny.”

Behind him, Trelawny laughed, and when Crawford turned around he saw that the old man had stood up and was walking away with his Junoesque robed companion.

Looking back down the room, Crawford saw McKee now — she was walking toward the woman who had addressed the crowd.

“May I borrow your opera glasses?” Crawford said to the young man beside him.

“My dear fellow,” the man replied, lifting the ribbon over his head and handing them to him.

“You’re very kind.” The focus was sharp, and in a moment Crawford was viewing the woman as if up close; she was very fat, with tiny dark eyes that weren’t made to seem bigger by the kohl dusted around her eyelids.

He saw the moment when she noticed McKee approaching — the woman’s eyes widened and then narrowed, and she turned away, toward the table. From his viewpoint at the end of the room farthest from the doors, Crawford was able to see her poke the fingers of one hand into the neckline of her orange silk dress and lift out some small object. She bent over a row of wine glasses, then replaced the object in her bosom and straightened and turned around.

For several seconds she made a show of looking around at the various groups in the room, and then her gaze fixed on someone closer, and Crawford’s view was blocked by the back of McKee’s hat.

“Thank you,” Crawford said, hastily handing back the opera glasses.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering how he would know if McKee’s meeting with Carpace were to “go wrong”—what had that business been with the wine glasses? — and then he decided, a bit breathlessly, that even letting McKee confront the old woman alone would be wrong enough, and he began threading his way rapidly around the chattering groups toward the two women.

He had two fingers in the pocket of his waistcoat, nervously ready to pull out the vial of garlic and bite it open if some roaring monster appeared in the smoky air.

He approached the table from behind Carpace, if that was indeed who the fat woman was, and McKee had not noticed him yet. Carpace had slid two wine glasses forward across the tablecloth, but she was looking at McKee, and so Crawford reached out and reversed the glasses.

Then he stepped back and said, “Am I intruding, ladies?”

McKee blinked at him in alarm and glanced around the room, but no devils seemed to be manifesting themselves. Still, he noticed that she stepped back to slightly increase the distance between them — and for just a moment he was distracted by her parted lips and wide eyes and chestnut hair, and the irrelevant realization that she was in fact very pretty.

“Hard to say,” she answered. “Mr. Crawford, this is Miss Carpace.”

Crawford looked away from McKee to the old woman.

Carpace turned to him with a smile that wrinkled her heavily powdered face. She was holding a decanter of red wine, and now she filled the two glasses and carefully handed one to McKee.

“Enchante, Mr. Crawford,” she said in a husky voice, “but Miss McKee is a sad hand at foreign names.” She waved her glass at the decanter. “Would you care for some wine? You must be the new poet.”

“No, thank you,” Crawford said, resolving, though, to pour a fresh glass for himself at the first opportunity. He too took a moment to look uneasily up toward the dark moldings in the corners of the vast room.

“Mr. Crawford,” said McKee, “is the father of Johanna. He knows my entire history.”

“Ah,” said Carpace, giving Crawford a reassessing look, “but nothing’s to be gained by stirring up our histories at this point, is there?” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “What could be more dull, really, than an old whore and an old bawd and an old cad reminiscing?” She sipped from her glass. “You have family, friends, business acquaintances, I’m sure, Mr. Crawford. My name is Carpaccio, hmm?”

“Carpaccio,” said Crawford, sweating with embarrassment. “Fair enough.”

“And you’ve brought us some verse, I trust!”

Crawford remembered the lines from Southey in his pocket. “I hope not.”

McKee touched her lips to the wine in her glass. “We need to know where the baby was buried.”

“Well now, I’ll tell you,” Carpace said. “Miss Thistle, I must hear the newest canto!” she added more loudly to a woman who had bustled up to the table. “But excuse me a moment while I recommend a good book on grammar to these neophytes.”

The poetess gave Carpace an amused, pitying glance and retreated into the dimly red-lit crowd.

Carpace drained her glass and put it down, then waved the decanter toward McKee. “Drink up, my dear, I know you love the stuff.”

“I’ve given it up. Where is she buried?”

Carpace frowned, rippling her whitened forehead. “Given it up? Oh dear. Not even just one, for old time’s sake? No? I see. Well, I can’t really give you adequate directions in the midst of this affair, now can I? You can see that. Let’s meet tomorrow, if you choose. Then I can even draw a map.”

McKee was frowning too. “Very well, that will have to do. Where shall we—”

But the glasses and decanters on the table rattled as Carpace suddenly leaned her hips back against it, and she dropped her wine glass to claw furrows in the powder on her pendulous cheek.

“You,” she whispered, “no, you were—” She turned clumsily toward Crawford. “You switched the glasses!”

Crawford just stared at her helplessly as McKee looked down at the dropped glass and then up at him with surprised comprehension.

Carpace’s hips slid off the table edge and she sat down heavily on the floor. The bass-drum thud was followed by alarmed cries and hurrying footsteps, but McKee, and then Crawford, knelt on the carpet beside the panting old woman. Crawford’s face was cold with sweat.

“Fetch an ave!” gasped Carpace. “Save me from Hell!”

“They don’t do that,” said McKee impatiently. “Where is Johanna buried?”

Carpace’s eyes were wide. “Fetch the woman who’s with Trelawny!”

“Tell me first.”

“Ach, too late, too late, the damned stuff works fast.” Her words were slurring. She bared her yellow teeth and squinted at McKee. “I’ll leave the world with truth on my lips. Johanna is alive.” She was barely able to articulate syllables now. “She — dith — did not — die.”

Carpace sneezed, inhaled deeply, and expelled her breath in a sigh that seemed to go on far too long, and then toppled sideways against Crawford’s quickly extended arm. Her head lolled loosely on his elbow, and her feathered headdress fell off her artificially darkened curls.

Crawford looked up in horrified bewilderment at the people who were now crowded around, and the first pair of eyes he met were those of the tall woman who had been with Trelawny — and he instinctively recoiled back from her, letting Carpace’s head fall to the floor. As a boy he had once awakened to see a leggy black wasp on his pillow, and this reflex now brought that icy moment forcefully to mind.

Now the woman had glided closer, or else had got bigger. The chattering of the crowd seemed to slow and fall in pitch until it was isolated clicks in total silence.

The woman was taller now, with a stark red light on the vast marble planes of her face like sunset on the highest of the Alps, and the intelligence in her glittering eyes was alien and old, older than organic life. The mouth opened like a rift in clouds, and suddenly he was profoundly cold. The whole world seemed to tilt toward her.

When he had moved — when he had still been able to move — there had been the faintest tug against his cheek and forehead, as if he had blundered into a cobweb, and now his nostrils stung with the acid scent of freshly broken stone…

But it was immediately subsumed in a sulfury reek of garlic; and the rapid exclamations and questions all around crashed back in his ears, and the dimensions of the room and the people in it seemed to fall back to their normal proportions. Warm air tingled on his cheeks and forehead. Able to move again, Crawford glanced at McKee and saw that she had unstoppered a vial and spilled the mushy yellow contents into her hand and on the carpet.

Crawford’s hand darted to the little bottle in his waistcoat, but the robed woman, once again just a tall woman, had flinched back, and her place at the front of the crowd was taken by ordinary people with anxious faces, and he decided to save it.

But the tall, gray-bearded figure of Trelawny pushed through the press of people then and knelt beside Crawford and McKee to peer at Carpace’s limp body where it lay in dimness half under the tablecloth hem.

“You two glow,” he growled. His lips were distorted by old scars into a snarl. “Did you come here to do this? You must be mad to come here, even with garlic.”

“I needed to find out something from her,” said McKee. Her lips were firm, but tears glittered in her eyes.

“Did you learn it?”

McKee shook her head.

Trelawny glanced sharply at her purse, though in the babel of querulous questions and shrill advice any noise her linnet made would surely have been drowned out. “You know Chichuwee?” asked Trelawny. “The Hail Mary man?”

“Of him,” said McKee.

“See him.” Trelawny glanced over his shoulder — Crawford followed his look, but didn’t see the tall, robed woman in the jabbering crowd.

“Get out of here,” said Trelawny. “Separately.” Looking up, he said, loudly, “Apoplectic fit. Fetch a physician.”

The crowd broke up then, some people hurrying away and some rushing forward to elbow Crawford and McKee out of the way, though no one jostled Trelawny.

McKee grabbed Crawford’s lapel and pulled his head to hers. “Your house,” she whispered, and then she had released him and disappeared in the dim light among the dozens of agitated poets.

Crawford stood up, and a woman caught his wrist — he jumped in alarm, but it was his client, the woman who had got him the invitation.

“Mr. Crawford, can you do something? You’re a medical man!”

Crawford had the impression that Trelawny looked up at that remark, but he said to the woman, “I’m afraid she’s gone. I believe it was her heart.”

“Oh! How horrible!” She shook her head and stepped back, then went on distractedly, “Old Mr. Figgins is well, by the way.”

Crawford had no idea who she was talking about. “Good, good,” he said automatically, wondering where McKee might be, “tell him we must get together for dinner sometime soon. I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.”

Before starting away he threw one more glance down at Trelawny. The old man met his eye and held up his hands, palms out, and then spread them and raised his eyebrows impatiently.

Baffled, Crawford held up his own hands in the same way.

Trelawny nodded with evident satisfaction and jerked his head toward the door before returning his attention to Carpace’s inert body.

CRAWFORD DIDN’T SEE MCKEE on the street, though admittedly she’d have had to be very close for him to see her in the yellow-stained fog, and he flagged down a hansom cab on Bloomsbury Street.

As the cab whirred south through the fog, Crawford huddled on the single seat, squinting into the damp and chilly headwind, and he tried to fit the events of the last fifteen minutes into his experience; they were as vivid and loud in his mind as if they were still happening, all overlapped and at once, and he wished his house was farther away so that he’d have time to relegate them — come to terms, see priorities and comparative magnitudes — before meeting Miss McKee again.

For the moment he simply shied away from thinking about the woman who had been with Trelawny, the woman who had seemed to stop his identity, crush it; to remember the encounter might be to reexperience it.

And the old woman Carpace had died there, and he had caused her death — he could simply have knocked both glasses off the table, couldn’t he? But that hadn’t even occurred to him at the time. Even so, he might have supposed it was opium or some similar drug that would only have made the drinker lose consciousness … but in fact, to the extent that he had thought of it at all, he knew he had assumed that one of the glasses had been primed with a lethal poison.

It was to save McKee … but he could have broken the glasses. Instead, he had switched them.

Sweat on his face and in his hair made the headwind even more sharply chilling, but he welcomed the immediacy of it.

Apoplectic fit, heart attack, those were plausible — no one had seen him switch the glasses. And even if someone had, what business did Carpace have putting poison in a wine glass? And mightn’t Crawford simply have a habit of idly moving objects around…?

Hidden away under layers of cloth, his heart was shaking inside his ribs.

The woman with Trelawny had been like the moon falling out of the sky onto him—

He took a deep breath and held it, and when he exhaled, he told himself that the evening’s scenes were falling away behind him with the steam of his breath.

The cab bounced across an intersection that he believed was High Holborn. He was just one anonymous Londoner among — what? a million? — in the foggy night.

He tried to imagine that his part in this entirely calamitous business was at an end. McKee had needed his help to get into that ill-starred salon — fair enough, and she had got it! — and now she could pursue her dubious quest alone.

He shifted uncomfortably on the damp leather seat at the memory of having found McKee attractive.

But her daughter — his daughter — was alive; according to that old dead bawd, at least.

I might have a living child, he told himself, cautiously tasting that thought.

Abruptly he remembered that Old Mr. Figgins was the name of his client’s dog, and his face burned now as he remembered saying that he and Figgins must get together for dinner. Did his client imagine that Crawford intended to have the dog sit at the table, or that Crawford proposed to crouch on the floor and share the dog’s dinner? Tomorrow he must send a note—

But the shallow evasive thought fell apart, leaving him with the weighty knowledge that he had a daughter, somewhere. She would be … six or seven years old now.

When the cab drew up in front of his house in the narrow lane that was Wych Street, Crawford had paid the cabbie and started up his steps before he noticed McKee leaning in the recessed doorway, out of the wind.

Thinking of overlapping auras, he quickly unlocked the door and led her into the parlor and turned up the gas jet. Cats, a few of them missing limbs, looked up incuriously from the couch.

“Shall I take your coat?” he asked neutrally, unbuttoning his own. His fingers were still trembling.

But McKee just laid her purse on the table by the couch and pulled the tiny cage out; she peered at the little bird for a moment, then set it down.

“I hope he shook all of this morning’s salt out of his tail,” she said. “With any luck, he did catch that old woman.”

The old woman I killed, Crawford thought; and he threw his coat onto a chair and crossed to the mantel. The fire had gone out, and the room was chilly.

“Will it — save her from Hell?” he asked as he poured himself a glass of whisky. He looked from his glass to McKee. “Would you like … some tea?”

“No. And no, thank you. We have to be going. No, the bird might have caught her ghost, but her ghost isn’t her.”

“Going? No, Miss McKee, I’ve—”

“You and I need to see a man.” She was pacing the carpet by the table.

Crawford shook his head in bewilderment. “Who, that Vindaloo fellow that Trelawny mentioned? Fricassee? Look what time it is — he’ll be asleep.”

McKee frowned and halted. “Trelawny? That old bearded man was Edward John Trelawny?”

“Apparently.”

“I think you saw the — the woman he was with.”

Crawford cleared his throat and nodded, and he took a gulp of the whisky before he dared to speak. “Good thing you were quick with your garlic,” he said finally, trying to put a light tone in his voice. “I”—he forced an awkward laugh—“almost tipped over and fell into her eyes.”

“It would have been a long fall. And it’s a good thing you were quick at switching glasses — I owe you my life, I believe.” She blinked at him, then looked away and went on, “But Trelawny didn’t … oppose us.”

“No,” said Crawford. He rubbed his free hand over his face. “In fact, before I left, he showed me the empty palms of his hands and made me show him mine. A … truce gesture?”

McKee shook her head. “He was establishing that neither of you is a member of the Carbonari. They all have a black brand on one palm. And it’s Chichuwee, not Vindaloo.” She canted her head and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “We need to go see him now, to save our daughter.”

For several seconds neither of them spoke; the only sound was throaty mumbling from the bird. Finally, “We’ll go in the morning,” Crawford said. “You and I can’t travel under a — a naked sky at night, correct?”

“It will be mainly … indoors. And she’s alive! Put your coat back on.”

Crawford tried to yell very quietly as he looked around the room and thought of his bed and the oblivion of sleep waiting for him upstairs.

His wife and younger son were dead, and Girard was … something like and unlike dead.

But this Johanna was, apparently, still alive.

He drained the whisky and, with huge reluctance, picked up his coat.

MCKEE WHISPERED, “YOU KNOW the Spotted Dog, on the next street?”

She and Crawford were standing in the recessed doorway of his house with the closed door at their backs. The night air was colder than ever, and her little birdcage was wrapped in a cloth in her handbag.

Crawford was hugging his coat around himself and shivering. “Of course.”

“Meet me there. I’ll walk west, around the old Inn of Chancery, and you go east, as we did this morning.” He saw a quick smile on her face in the shadows, and she softly sang a couple of lines from a popular song: “‘Meet me by moonlight alone, / And then I will tell you a tale.’”

And something-something at the end of the vale, thought Crawford, remembering the vapid lyrics. And was it, he thought forlornly, only this morning that this woman and I walked down to the Strand and got in an old hackney cab with that clerk? And the day’s not done yet.

She had tapped down the steps and was hurrying away to his right, quickly disappearing in the shadows of the old overhanging houses that were now mostly used-clothing shops.

Crawford touched the lump under his coat that was the little bottle of crushed garlic, then sighed and descended the steps and set off to the east.

This end of the street was brighter, for the windows of the Angel public house glowed amber in the fog ahead of him, and, when he had rounded both corners of the place, he could see the blurry lights of the bookshops that had driven the old-clothes business into the next street — though the gigantic masks over the vacated costume warehouse still grimaced down from the murky shadows overhead as he passed by.

The Spotted Dog was at the far end of Holywell Street, almost to Newcastle Street, and Crawford, his gloved hands deep in his overcoat pockets, peered in at the shop windows he passed. Three-volume novels, newspapers, pamphlets denouncing Darwin … he wondered if the young authoress of the Lunar Encomium was represented by any published books. On the whole, he hoped not.

CHAPTER SIX

MCKEE HAD ARRIVED at their rendezvous before he did and pulled the door open for him.

“We’ll have to buy two tickets,” she said, “even though we’re only going downstairs.” She had four pennies in her hand, and she pushed the big brown coins across the counter of a little window set into the wooden wall of the entry hall; and a moment later she turned and handed Crawford a dented tin card, keeping another in her gloved hand.

She gestured toward the open doorway beyond the counter, and Crawford shrugged and stepped through into what proved to be a vast kitchen lit by gas jets between the beams of the ceiling, with at least twenty people standing around on the flagstone floor or sitting on a bench that ran like a continuous shelf around the whole room. A big black iron stove stood in a far corner, and something was cooking that involved bacon and onions. Some people were lining up with plates.

Crawford looked hopefully at McKee, but she shook her head. “Downstairs,” she said, nodding toward a doorway in the back wall, which was papered with posters announcing various music-hall performers.

Crawford followed her across the room, promising himself a good supper when he got back home.

A couple of the men on the bench called, “Addie!” and another said, “Back in trade, girl?”

“Don’t you just wish, Joey,” she said to him, not pausing.

Beyond the doorway was a dark hall and a flight of wooden stairs leading down. A cold draft welled up from below, smelling of wet clay and wood smoke.

McKee paused at the top of the stairs to shed her coat and bonnet and hang them on a couple of hooks in the wall. “Leave your hat and coat here,” she said. “And take off your gloves. You’ll want to be able to feel the walls.”

Crawford sighed and carefully hung his coat and hat on another hook and stuffed the gloves in his trousers pocket.

The stairs were unlit, and as McKee and Crawford descended below the level of the floor, he held the banister rail and felt for each step with his boot.

He was holding the little tin card in his left hand. “Will we need to show these to anybody?” he whispered. “The tickets.”

“Those are for bed check,” came her voice from the darkness below him. “We’re not going to be sleeping here.”

“No,” he agreed, tucking the thing in his pocket on top of his gloves. He peered uselessly upward, wondering what sort of beds the Spotted Dog offered. “Shouldn’t we have brought lanterns?”

“It’s considered arrogant. There’ll be light after a while, farther down.”

Considered arrogant by whom? he wondered. “Shouldn’t we be talking in whispers?”

“Not yet. This is still the Spotted Dog basement, really.”

The banister ended in a splintery stump, and as they descended farther he had to press his right palm against rough bricks.

Crawford cleared his throat and spoke a little more loudly. “You’ve been here before?”

“A couple of times. But there are ways down all over the City.”

“Are we … going into the sewers?” Crawford had heard stories about feral rats and pigs that lived in the London sewers. “What I mean to say is — I’m not going into the sewers.” Her definition of downstairs was proving to be more far-reaching than he had expected.

“Old sewers,” she said in what was apparently meant to be a reassuring tone. “Ones that have been cut out of the system by newer ones. Just damp tunnels now, except when it rains. Right below us was a regular Phlegethon a couple of years ago, but the new interceptory Piccadilly Branch drained it.”

“Phlegethon,” said Crawford, largely to gauge the volume of the unseen space they were in by the way his voice rang in the dark. “Plato’s flaming river to the underworld, in Phaedrus. You’re well-read.”

“This one caught fire too, sometimes. Oil and decaying ghosts on the water igniting — smoke coming up out of street gratings — you probably noticed it. I’ve always been one for having the nose in a book, and at Carpace’s there was plenty of spare time for reading.” He heard her pause below him. “Steps ending here, flat floor for a while. Not level, but flat.”

“I,” said Crawford carefully, “killed her. Carpace.”

The sound of her steps changed from clumping on wood to tapping on stone, and he stepped carefully down onto the sloping floor.

“If you had not,” McKee said, “she would have killed me.” He heard her sigh. “I suppose I parade it, sometimes. Quoting things. So people at least won’t assume I’m a typical ex-whore and Hail Mary dealer.”

So much for Carpace, Crawford thought. “Not just one more of that lot,” he agreed, and she laughed quietly.

“Your holy well is up ahead,” she said. “Roman stonework, I’m told. It was probably on the surface once, along with a lot else — London keeps shifting underground. One day people will—” Her footsteps stopped. “Yes, here it is. One day people will have to go down into tunnels to see St. Paul’s.”

Crawford could see … not a glow, but a lessening in the darkness ahead; and after a few more steps, his outstretched palms collided with a waist-high stone coping. The smoky smell seemed to be rising from beyond it, and now it bore a faint salt-and-rot tang of the river.

Then McKee startled him by saying, loudly, “Origo lemurum.”

He jumped again when McKee’s hand touched his face — she brought her head close to his and breathed in his ear, “Whispers from here on, I think. And not loquacious. Feel over the rim — there’s rungs, leading down.”

He let her carry his hand over the rim of the well and press it against the stones of the curved inner wall, and his fingers brushed an iron bracket.

Downstairs! he thought. “Is this the only way?” he whispered desperately.

“No. Best, for now.”

Then she had released his hand, and he heard her long skirt rustle against stone; and when he heard a scuff from down in the well, he realized that she had swung over into the shaft and that one of her shoes was on a lower rung.

He was about to call her back and absolutely refuse to climb down — but the tunnel they were in apparently extended on past the well, and now he heard a sort of whistling moan from far away in that direction.

It was answered by a similar sound, but shriller and perhaps not so far away, from behind him.

He was sweating, and now he had to restrain himself from clambering over the well coping until he heard McKee’s shoes on rungs a good distance below. Finally he slid one leg over the edge and scuffed around with his boot until it rested on the iron rung, and, trembling and mouthing frightened curses, he lowered himself into the well until he could feel the next rung down with his other foot. As soon as it seemed possible, he let go of the stone coping with one hand and grabbed the topmost rung, and after that he was able to descend steadily.

He had no idea how far behind his back the opposite wall of the well might be, and soon he had lost count of the rungs he had passed. He wondered vaguely if they were below the level of the river.

There were moths, or some other sort of silent-flying insects, in the shaft — the first one that brushed against his face almost startled him into letting go of his perch, but after several softly fluttering impacts against his face and hands, he was able to ignore them. Apparently they didn’t sting.

The repetitive motions of descending the rungs became metronomic and almost mesmerizing, and he found himself imagining, very clearly, wooden forts barely crowding back forests along the Thames, the banks of which were notched in several places where wide fresh streams flowed into it.

His thoughts returned to his present situation when he realized that he could see the iron rungs in front of his face — dimly, but well enough to place a hand firmly on one without pawing at the wall first; though he still couldn’t see any of the blundering winged insects. The river smell was stronger on the upward breeze, and it seemed to have a sour tobacco-smoke reek in it.

McKee’s whisper sounded loud in the shaft: “Last rung — drop from here.”

Drop? he thought. And get back up how?

But a moment later he heard her shoes chuff against something like sand, and soon his foot found no more rungs below to stand on, nor, when he swung it back and forth, any more wall.

He lowered himself to the last rung by the strength of his arms alone, and when he was hanging by both hands from the last rung, he opened his mouth to tell her that he was about to drop, but realized that she could tell where he was just by the noise of his breathing. Vaguely he could see the texture of some motionless surface below him.

He let go. For a dizzying second he was spread-eagled in empty air, and then the sandy surface struck his boot soles and his knee chopped him hard under the jaw, and he was sitting in loose, damp sand. The smell he had thought of as tobacco-like was stronger but now seemed more like sour, crushed seaweed.

McKee was standing, so he got to his feet, rubbing his chin and brushing the seat of his trousers, and he was cautiously pleased that there didn’t seem to be any of the flying insects down here. His eyes had grown sufficiently accustomed to the dim glow to see that they were in a circular chamber with archways opening at irregular intervals around its circumference; he counted seven of them, and all of them showed blurs of many-times-reflected light in their farther reaches. The distant airy groaning was audible again, and he glanced around nervously, but he couldn’t tell which arch or arches it might be echoing out of.

“What is that?” he whispered.

“A noise. Hush.”

The caged bird chirped inside its handkerchief several times, and Crawford saw McKee’s arm extend toward one of the arches, and then they had stepped through it and he was trudging along after her through the clinging sand, crouching to keep from knocking his head against the wet bricks of the low arched ceiling. To Crawford’s relief, the only sound from ahead of them was a muffled chittering like crickets.

This tunnel curved to the left, and kept on curving, and Crawford soon realized that they were tracing an ever-tighter spiral; the light from ahead was brighter and distinctly yellow now, and the cricket sound was recognizable as the cheeping of many birds. A smell like rancid butter reminded him of chicken coops he had visited professionally.

And then McKee’s chestnut hair glowed in direct lamplight, and she stepped to the left into a wood-floored circular room no more than fifteen feet across.

Crawford followed her in, and then squinted in the jarring glare of a paraffin lantern — it was mounted on the back railing of a wagon, which was either cut in half and mounted against the brick wall or was completely filling a farther tunnel. Only after he had taken in the cages full of small noisy birds stacked around the walls did Crawford notice the dwarfish, white-bearded figure sitting cross-legged beside the lantern.

“Look at the two of you!” the figure said in a deep voice. “A couple of doomed souls if I ever saw any. Which church did you come down?”

“St. Clement’s,” said McKee, speaking loudly to be heard over the shrill racket of the birds. “Origo lemurum, oranges and lemons. I’m Adelaide McKee—”

The birds all around them were chattering excitedly.

“You’re a prostitute,” said the dwarf. His lean old face held no evident expression.

McKee shook her head. “That’s old news. I’ve changed careers. I’m a Hail Mary dealer now. Are you Chichuwee?”

“No, child, you’ve found the chambers of the prime minister. Of course I’m Chichuwee.”

The dwarf swept his long white beard over his shoulder and hopped down from the cart, and the boards of the floor shook and boomed hollowly like a drum — apparently it was just a platform mounted over a deep shaft. Crawford eyed the arch they had come in through, ready to grab McKee and dive for it if the boards under their feet should shift.

He thought he could hear, over the incessant cheeping of all the birds, a clicking and rattling from the farther shadows of the cart.

“This,” McKee went on, “is John Crawford.”

“Husband, brother?”

“Neither one,” said McKee hastily. “But he is the father of a child of mine, a little girl.”

The dwarf limped forward and gave Crawford a disapproving look from under bushy white eyebrows, and Crawford met the gaze, reluctantly conceding that he deserved the disapproval — though it seemed unlikely that this creature might be a model of virtuous living himself.

A handshake seemed to be unlikely, so Crawford just nodded. After an awkward moment, he ventured, “Is that an Indian name? Chichuwee?”

The old dwarf just spat, and McKee said, “It’s a birdcall. All the great old Hail Mary artists are named for birdcalls.” To Chichuwee she added, “We need to get an answer from a person.”

The dwarf shrugged. “Not difficult.”

“It’s a person who’s dead.”

“More difficult. Newly dead, I hope? Not lost beyond recall in the river?”

“Less than an hour ago, and I may,” she said, “have caught her in my linnet.” She held out her little handkerchief-wrapped birdcage. “It’s Carpace, the old bawd. John here killed her — tricked her into drinking a glass of poisoned wine she meant for me.”

“Carpace!” Chichuwee gave Crawford another look, perhaps more respectful. “She panders to a bigger sort of clients these days — ones that particularly like artists and poets. Even before you were born, she was drinking wine from amethyst cups at the Galatea under London Bridge.” He frowned at McKee’s bird. “She always loved her own self too much to surrender to that unhuman family, and she was savvy enough with her evasion tricks to keep from getting trapped by them. I bet now, though, she wishes she was due to be climbing up out of a grave, even if she wouldn’t really be herself anymore.”

The old dwarf now gave Crawford a somehow unflattering wink. “You weren’t tempted to just take the ghost yourself?”

“He’s not a Neffy!” said McKee, apparently insulted on Crawford’s behalf.

Crawford blinked at her. “Take it?” he asked. “Neffy?”

“People who have let themselves be bitten by these devils,” explained McKee. “They can sometimes catch a very fresh ghost, ingest it, and it supposedly gives them extra psychic strength — lets them control the people around them for a minute or so.”

“Come in then,” sighed the old dwarf, turning back toward the wagon, “and we’ll see if we can get your answer.”

“Will you question the bird?” Crawford asked.

“No,” said the old dwarf. “The bird doesn’t know anything.”

McKee was carefully unwrapping the handkerchief from around the birdcage — Crawford saw that the bird had fouled the cloth square — and, holding it by one corner, she stepped after Chichuwee. As they drew closer to the lantern, they threw huge shadows across the tiers of birdcages on the curved walls.

Crawford reluctantly followed McKee out across the creaking floor toward the wagon, wrinkling his nose at the strong smell from all the birdcages.

“Sam!” called Chichuwee. “Get some river water boiling.”

Behind the glare of the lantern Crawford now saw that there was a cabin set back on the bed of the wagon, for a pale child was peeking wide-eyed from a doorway in it. The child tossed two tiny white objects to Chichuwee and disappeared back inside.

The old dwarf tossed the objects to the floor, and Crawford saw that they were dice.

McKee turned and caught Crawford’s chin in her hand. “Don’t look at the numbers on them,” she said. “But if you want to be helpful, you could pick them up and throw them, over and over again. Not looking, remember.”

Crawford grimaced in anxious impatience but nodded and crouched; he scooped up the two ivory cubes and dropped them, then did it again.

“I’m going to have to be getting back to … streets, again, soon,” he said.

“This water boils quick,” said Chichuwee. “It’s in a pot that’s actually up in the Alps, so the air pressure is very low.”

Crawford picked up the dice and let them fall. “But the pot is here — too?”

“Enough of it to boil water in,” said the dwarf. “Be quiet now.”

Crawford scowled at McKee, who just shrugged.

As he dropped the dice one more time onto the floor, it occurred to Crawford that he had been hearing this repetitive rattle ever since they had entered this chamber. Were these dice thrown perpetually, their numbers never read? Chichuwee must employ a relay of children to keep it up.

Three wooden steps beside the far wheel led up to the wagon bed, and Chichuwee and then McKee climbed up, skirted the lantern, and shuffled to the door the child Sam had peeked out of. Even Chichuwee had to crouch to fit through the open door, and McKee had to crawl through on her hands and knees.

“Dice, dice!” she called back over her shoulder, and Crawford hastily dropped the dice and snatched them up; and she added, “Follow.”

The finches and larks around the walls seemed to echo the cadence of “Dice, dice!” and Crawford tossed the dice up onto the wagon bed and hastily scrambled up after them.

A curtain was sliding over McKee’s back as she crept forward, and Crawford could see a glow of candlelight on her hands; then he crawled under the curtain too and found himself in a room he could stand up in. He remembered to toss the dice and scoop them up before getting to his feet.

This room clearly extended beyond the wall of the birdcage chamber, and, between shelves that were crowded with ragged books and obscure brass and crystal instruments, closed curtains implied windows in the varnished wood paneling that gleamed in the light of a dozen candles in glass chimneys.

The boy Sam was crouched over a low iron stove, watching water bubble in a glass pot; but when Crawford looked more closely, he saw that there was apparently no pot at all — the flat-topped ball of bubbling gray water was holding its shape with no visible containment.

Sam straightened and crossed to Crawford with his palm out, and then had to nudge him, for Crawford was gaping at the prodigy on the stove; finally the boy pried the dice from Crawford’s limp hand and hurried away to resume throwing them in the corner.

“You know how this is done?” Chichuwee asked McKee.

“Yes.” She set the birdcage on a shelf near the impossible volume of water. To Crawford, she said, “This will draw the ghost, if there’s a ghost there.”

Chichuwee nodded to her, and she dropped the soiled handkerchief into the boiling water. Steam immediately sprang up, and at this point Crawford was hardly surprised to see that the vapor didn’t dissipate but instead floated over the water in a distinct wobbly oval.

“Lucky,” said Chichuwee, shaking his head. “If it’s her.”

McKee crouched so that her face was level with the blob of steam while the handkerchief spun in the water below. Crawford noticed that, in spite of her show of confidence, she was trembling.

“Carpace,” she said.

A whisper bubbled out of the water in puffs of vapor: “None of the officers wear waistcoats in the mornings… I travel with two canes, one for morning and one for evening…”

“Damn,” said McKee, “it’s that ghost that was buzzing around the bird by the Temple Arch this morning. Carpace!” Sweat gleamed on her forehead in the candlelight.

“… catch me, the ground quakes…! I—Adelaide.”

“Got her,” said McKee with feral satisfaction; then, to the vapor, she said, “You shouldn’t drink.”

“Drink,” whispered the steam, “the glasses, the man switched them? Am I dead?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, don’t look at me!” The steam oval wavered. “Back in my ave!”

“Soon,” said McKee, “and then you can share all the half-wit gossip of the ghosts. But first — you said my daughter is alive.”

“Fly to the rooftops,” the steam bubbled, “trade stories with the sparrows. Nobody looking at me.”

“Yes,” said McKee, “greet every dawn before the people in the streets below see it. Where is my daughter?”

“Her name is Johanna.”

“Yes. Where is she?”

“Your man switched the glasses. Ach! I think I puked, in front of everybody.”

“No, not a bit,” McKee reassured the frail ghost. “It was as dignified a death as I ever saw. Where is Johanna?”

“I told you she died. At a different time than now.”

“Yes. But then you said that she is still alive.”

“Aye, she’s alive, but—”

McKee waved her open hand. “But…?”

“She’s not well, to speak of.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“Why can’t I think? Promise you’ll put me back in the ave.”

“I promise.”

“Hope to die?”

“Hope to die.”

“Fair enough. She’s alive but pledged to death and eventual resurrection.” The boiling water emitted several pops that Crawford thought might have indicated laughter. “I … adopted her out to the Nephilim.”

Even though it was just an inorganic whisper, the last word seemed to concuss the still air.

Crawford gripped his elbows and held his breath so that it wouldn’t hitch audibly. His mother and father had used the term Nephilim to describe the supernatural tribe they had escaped and spent the rest of their lives hiding from.

And he remembered his encounter with Girard, after Girard’s death on the river … and the thing he and McKee had encountered seven years ago on Waterloo Bridge.

And, it occurred to him, the woman who had been with Trelawny tonight.

Can we … oppose those things? he wondered; surely not. But he was surprised at the anxiety and grief he felt for a daughter he had only learned of today and who he had thought was dead until an hour ago.

McKee’s face in profile looked older and haggard, but she said, “Where can we find her?”

Crawford shuddered.

“This will be my first dawn, as a bird,” babbled the steam.

“Where can we find Johanna?”

“Put me back in my ave and I’ll take you there, over the rooftops.”

“You’ll move too fast. We need to walk where we go. Where can we find her?”

The steam said, “The river, now — it’s cold and dark, and full of eely things.”

McKee opened her mouth to repeat her question, but the steam went on, “Her father is swallowed in Highgate; she brings him flowers.”

“Swallowed,” said McKee, frowning, “flowers — is he buried? Is he buried in Highgate Cemetery?”

“Often I’ve seen Johanna there,” whispered the blurry oval over the globe of water, “at night. Perhaps I’ll fly to her now.”

“Does she … live at the cemetery?”

“For now she does, I think. Soon she’ll be busy being dead there.”

McKee nodded at Chichuwee, then straightened up and took her birdcage from the shelf and handed it to Crawford. “Take this into the other room,” she told him. “I don’t want her getting back in.”

Chichuwee was dropping handfuls of rusty nails and screws into the water now, and it stopped boiling.

Crawford nodded and crawled back through the curtain into the shaking cacophony of cheeping birds, and stepped down from the wagon to the creaking wooden floor. He walked quickly to the archway through which they had entered, and looked at the bright-eyed bird in the little cage he was holding.

“I imagine you’re glad to be rid of her,” he said quietly.

The bird just blinked at him.

A moment later Chichuwee and McKee emerged from the low wagon doorway; the old dwarf sat down on the wagon bed, nearly invisible again below the bright glare of the lantern, and McKee walked down the steps and crossed to where Crawford stood.

“Piping bullfinches,” came Chichuwee’s deep voice. “Two dozen of ’em.”

Crawford saw McKee wince.

“And four dozen miscellaneous,” the old dwarf added.

“That’d be larks and linnets, mostly, in winter,” McKee said.

“Fine. And scrapings of church bells, Fleetditch or St. Catherine’s.” He glanced at the excited birds and then looked squarely at Crawford. “Any reason you got cat ghosts following you?”

Crawford actually looked behind himself but saw no diaphanous cat forms. “Uh,” he said, “I’m an animal doctor. I—”

Chichuwee interrupted with a wave like a benediction. “You’re mad if you try to find the girl,” he said, “but in any case don’t get killed before you pay me. Travel by day, wear metal, and do you know the crossing sweeper who takes only a ha’penny?”

“I know him,” said McKee.

“Pass through the eye of his needle when you can.”

“And you keep your dice rolling,” said McKee.

She turned away and led Crawford back into the spiral tunnel, and the light quickly faded behind them. Crawford couldn’t see at all now in the darkness after the hard light of the paraffin lantern. He remembered to keep his head down.

“Carpace won’t get a bird to live in,” he guessed. “An ave.”

“No,” came McKee’s voice from ahead of him. “She’s spilled into the sewers, and good enough for her — she’ll wind up in the river with everybody else.”

Crawford didn’t say anything.

“Promises to ghosts don’t count,” McKee said. “They’re promises to nobody.” She plodded through the wet sand for a few moments, then went on, “Piping bullfinches he’ll wait for, they need training, but he’ll want the miscellaneous pretty quick. I’ll have to bring my nets out to Hampstead or Tottenham — used to be I could get hundreds at Primrose Hill, but the railway has frightened them all away. But—” Crawford heard her fist hit the damp brick wall. “But merciful God, how will we get her away from the devils? She was such a sweet-natured baby!”

“I’d — bring a priest,” said Crawford helplessly. “Two priests, big ones.”

“I’m not sure what side of the line priests would see her on. But at least she hasn’t died yet.”

“If Carpace was telling the truth, in any of this.”

“Ghosts are stupid, but they can’t lie.”

Crawford could tell by the curve of the brick wall under his sliding hand that the tunnel was straightening, and soon they were able to stand up in what must have been the circular chamber with the seven arches and the hole in the ceiling, though he still couldn’t see anything.

From some direction he heard again the gasping, moaning sound he’d heard on the way down, and it seemed louder, or closer, now.

“How do we get back up the well?” he asked, barely remembering to whisper.

“We don’t go back up it. Come on.” She patted his arm and took hold of his hand and began leading him forward. “Two to the left from Chichuwee’s is the way out.” They were moving up a slope now.

“What is that noise?”

“Vox cloacarum, the voice of the sewers. Tide and pressure changes force air through all the clogged channels, and you get that.”

The sound trailed off in indistinct syllables this time, though, and Crawford thought he heard sand shifting and rocks grating in the blackness behind and below them. His forehead was cold, and he was suddenly achingly aware of the vast volumes of earth above him, between the windy streets of London and this dark intestine of the earth.

McKee’s hand brushed his face, and then one of her fingers pressed firmly against his lips; and she began tugging him along more quickly.

From behind them, echoing, came a woman’s voice: “John.”

Crawford’s ribs went tinglingly cold. He didn’t stop, but he looked back — a dim blue glow stained the darkness behind them, possibly beyond the curve of the low ceiling.

Veronica! he thought.

“That’s my wife’s voice,” he whispered shakily.

“She’s dead, I believe?”

“That’s right.”

“Keep moving. Don’t say her name.”

They plodded more quickly up the tunnel, their boots sloshing in muddy sand. Crawford dragged the fingers of his free hand along the wall and trusted that McKee had an arm extended in front of them.

The subterranean breeze was at their backs, and the seaweed-and-rot smell was gone — the air now smelled of mimosa.

“Her perfume?” whispered McKee.

A strangled syllable: “Yes.”

“John,” came the voice from behind again; Crawford could hear motion back down there, but the grinding sound seemed to imply a very big body moving. “Be safe. Stay. Forget everything. Never be afraid again.”

The mimosa scent was stronger, cloying. To his surprise, Crawford found himself wanting to obey the voice; he didn’t let go of McKee’s hand or slacken his trotting pace, but the thing behind them was at least to some extent mimicking Veronica, his wife — wouldn’t staying down here with an imitation of her, even a grotesque imitation, be preferable to his empty life in that unroofed world of cold sunlight so far above?

He remembered thinking, at the salon, that McKee was attractive — and now he couldn’t understand why he had thought so.

The breeze from behind was coming intermittently now, in puffs — was it breath, her breath?

“Father,” came a boy’s echoing voice, closer, from back in the darkness. It was the voice of his younger son, Richard. Crawford moaned behind clenched teeth.

“Johanna is still alive,” came McKee’s breathless whisper.

That was right, he had a daughter up there somewhere.

But pledged to death and eventual resurrection.

“I named her,” panted McKee, “after you.”

John, Johann, Johanna. Six or seven years old now. Unbaptized, like the poor animals he cared for.

McKee pinched his thumb hard, and then gripped his hand tightly. Her hand felt hot.

“Stay with me,” she said, quickening their pace still further and pulling him along. “I’m alive.”

And so am I, he thought, suddenly very tired. And a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.

The dragging sounds from behind were louder. Crawford’s legs were beginning to ache.

McKee said — no whispering now—“Do you have any iron, steel?”

Crawford thought about it as they jogged on upward through the darkness. “My watch,” he panted. “The clockwork in it.”

“A timepiece! Perfect. Quickly, stop and bash it to pieces against the wall. Don’t drop any of the pieces!”

Crawford fished his watch from his waistcoat pocket, then slid to a halt and broke a fingernail prying the back cover open; holding the watch cupped in his hand, he slammed it against the brick wall while pressing the open palm of his other hand against the bricks below it to catch any falling pieces.

“Drop the watch, John,” echoed the approaching voices of his wife and son, “time doesn’t matter here.” He could hear wet sand shifting only yards away, and the mimosa perfume was failing to cover a smell of fermented decay.

After two more rapid spasmodic blows, he had a scant, bristly handful of what felt like tiny gears.

Something webby and wet brushed his face and he convulsively lashed out, flinging the bits of metal in a wide arc behind him.

The clinging membrane was snatched away, and he spun his wrecked watch on its chain and slung that toward the voices too. The air shook with a sound like dozens of castanets.

McKee yanked him back by the collar, and then the two of them were running.

“That’s stopped them for now,” she panted, “and we’re nearly out.”

Crawford forced himself to look only forward. I’m sorry, Veronica! he thought.

And now he could see a tall, dim, round-topped shape — it was a volume of dimly lit space on the far side of a dark archway, and in moments they had skidded around the left-hand side of the arch; a wide knobby surface slanted up in front of them, and when McKee let go of his hand to begin scrambling up the incline, he followed her and realized that he was climbing up, or rather across, the face of a toppled building. A rounded stone bar across his path was an attached column, and he followed McKee as she skirted a semicircular hole that was the top of an arched doorway.

The faint illumination was coming from above them, and when they had climbed around a wide balcony and were scrambling between the holes of windows, he recognized the white glow as moonlight.

“What—is this?” Crawford gasped.

“A first-century Roman building,” came McKee’s reply, “wrecked when Boadicea destroyed London.”

Knocked right over sideways, thought Crawford with some awe as he continued climbing.

At last they came to the highest corner of the building — it was a rounded berm of masonry in front of them, probably the middle of a now-diagonal turret — and the moonlight was slanting in through a rectangular hole some twenty feet overhead.

“It’s an easy climb now,” said McKee, pausing, “and we should leave separately. We’ll come up in a yard off Portugal Street, only a few streets from your house.”

“Why didn’t we come down this way?” panted Crawford. “It looks easier than that well.”

“For getting out, it is. Entering requires protocol, though — those ghost-moths would have been … different, if we had tried to avoid the well and the incantation.” There was enough moonlight for him to see her brush her dark hair back from her forehead. “Tomorrow we need to visit somebody.”

“I’ve got business, horses to see,” said Crawford, standing on the gritty curved surface of the ancient turret wall and staring longingly up at the patch of moonlight. “I’m afraid I won’t be—”

“This woman can help us save Johanna,” McKee interrupted, “if anybody can. She knows about these things.”

“Another of your — your Hail Mary artists?”

“No — she’s a poet, actually — though not the sort to have been at that salon tonight. And she’s a sister at the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women … which happens to be right near Highgate Cemetery. Her name is Christina Rossetti.”

Crawford had never heard of her.

“After my surgery hours, then,” he said. “Noon, say.” He was still staring up at the moonlight. “Portugal Street? Near St. Clement’s?”

“Near enough. Within the origo lemurum incantation.”

“What’s that mean?” he asked. He was squinting at the slope ahead and bracing himself for the last bit of climbing. “You said it, earlier.”

“You’ve got to placate the old … gods or devils or whatever they are, who are confined down here. Protocol. Origo lemurum is Latin for something like ‘maker of ghosts,’ I’m told. You remember it by ‘oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ The old rhyme gives invocations for other ways down too, near other churches.”

Churches, thought Crawford bitterly. No wonder I stay away from them.

McKee waved at the muddy slope that led up to the street. “You go first; I’ll follow in a couple of minutes. And I’ll be at your door at noon tomorrow.”

Crawford was already wondering when he might conveniently get his coat and hat back from the Spotted Dog, but he asked, “You’ll be safe here? By yourself?”

He saw her exhausted smile. “Quite safe, thank you for asking.”

He hesitated, suddenly reluctant to leave her. “That watch was seven years old,” he remarked. “I bought it after ruining my last one when we dove into the river.”

She shrugged. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He smiled, then turned away and plodded to the embankment; it was in shadow, but it wasn’t steep, and the timbers and masonry of buried and long-forgotten buildings made climbing easy enough. Within minutes he had clambered up out of a coal chute in a street he didn’t recognize — men were smoking clay pipes on a set of steps nearby, but none of them appeared to see anything odd about Crawford’s entrance into the scene — and after he had walked randomly through several sharply turning streets, he found himself at the broad lanes of the Strand, facing the spire of St. Clement Danes.

And this is where you started this morning, he thought bewilderedly, turning his weary steps toward home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHRISTINA LOOKED AWAY from her gentleman caller, who sat on the sofa a few yards away across the carpet, but her wandering gaze happened to fall on her mother’s treasured portrait of Uncle John Polidori on the wall over the slant-front desk, and so she reluctantly looked back at Charles Cayley, who was leaning forward earnestly.

“They’re so…” he began.

Seconds ticked by on the old clock on the mantel. Christina remembered her father winding that clock every Sunday, in their old house in Charlotte Street.

She sighed, catching a whiff of Cayley’s liberally applied cologne. The tea was getting cold in the pot, and Cayley had eaten all the digestive biscuits. Perhaps his stomach was out of order.

She recalled that she and Cayley had been talking about his recent translation of the Psalms. He had published it at his own expense, and the Rossetti family had charitably subscribed for a dozen copies.

“… savage!” he finished at last.

“True,” she agreed. “God was raising the Jews by steps from barbarism to a state in which they could receive His son, and they were still genuine barbarians, in those early steps.”

“But to ask a blessing! — in the otherwise sublime 137th Psalm — on anyone who would knock the brains out of a Babylonian infant! I don’t—”

He was off in a pause again. Sunlight outside made the lace curtains glow behind Cayley, and all Christina could clearly see of him was his balding head and his ears and the edges of his beard, but she knew he would be faintly, awkwardly, smiling.

Christina’s mother was pottering about in the kitchen and would not interrupt what she saw as, what might in fact be, a courtship. But Maria would, mercifully, be home soon.

Christina poured out the last of the tea in the pot into Cayley’s cup, and she was about to use the emptied pot as an excuse to join her mother for a few moments in the kitchen when three clanks on the front door knocker made both her and Cayley jump.

Lillibet the housekeeper would answer the door in a few moments, but Christina stood up to answer it herself, glad of the opportunity. “Excuse me a moment, Charles.”

She hurried to the hall, and paused to look in the mirror between two potted geraniums to make sure her hair was not pushed up in the back from slouching in her chair. Maria would not have knocked.

When Christina pulled open the front door, squinting in the sunlight and the winter breeze, she smiled at the respectably dressed man and woman who stood on the doorstep. They were probably students from Maria’s Sunday Bible class, come to ask a question or return a book.

Then the woman pushed the bonnet back from her brown hair, and Christina recognized her.

“Adelaide!” she exclaimed wonderingly.

Cayley, always socially inept, had shuffled up behind her, his old-fashioned tailcoat flapping in the chilly draft.

“Adelaide Procter?” he asked brightly.

Cayley evidently supposed this was the devoutly Christian poetess who did volunteer work for homeless women and children in Bishopsgate.

“Hardly,” laughed Christina without thinking, distracted by the uncomfortable sunlight. Then, embarrassed, she smiled and said, “Won’t you come in, Adelaide? And—?”

“This is John Crawford,” said Adelaide McKee, stepping into the hall and unbuttoning her coat. “You remember I had a daughter? John is the father.”

Christina suppressed a frown — at the Magdalen Penitentiary the reformed prostitutes were told that they must not reestablish contact with characters from their degraded pasts, and this was certainly a violation of that rule. And Christina recalled now that McKee had never agreed to leave London either.

But in the heat of embarrassment, Christina had already invited them in. And she could hardly ask poor Cayley to leave.

She introduced the company to one another, and Cayley was blushing behind his beard, and his nervous smile was broad. Clearly he had gathered that this couple was not married.

“Do join us in the parlor,” Christina went on bravely. “I was just about to have a fresh pot of tea brought in.”

For a moment she thought McKee had tittered at the remark, and she dreaded an uncomfortable conversation, then realized that McKee had a bird in her handbag.

That, at least, was a good sign. “Keeping the Hail Mary dealers busy?” Christina said.

“I am one now,” said McKee. “With, in fact,” she added, glancing toward her dubious companion, “a tall order at the moment.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Christina sincerely. “Honest work, lots of fresh air.” She led the company back into the parlor, and when all three of her guests were seated and blinking uneasily at one another, she leaned through the kitchen door.

“Visitors from the Magdalen,” she told her mother. “Could you ask Lillibet to bring us another pot?”

She sat down beside Cayley and gazed frankly at Adelaide’s companion. Mr. Crawford didn’t look depraved, sitting beside her with his bowler hat in his lap — his dark brown hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he had the air of a professional man, or a scholar, caught in embarrassing circumstances.

“What do you do, Mr. Crawford?” she asked.

The man shifted uneasily. “I’m a veterinary surgeon, Miss Rossetti — a horse doctor. I have a surgery in Wych Street.”

Emboldened by this sally, Cayley turned his nervous smile on Adelaide and said, “Hail Mary dealers?” The presence of strangers made Christina aware again of how high pitched his voice was. “Are you a Roman Catholic, Miss McKee?”

Christina knew that Cayley didn’t think much of Catholics. “It’s slang for dealers in live songbirds,” she said, and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “Ave, from avis, in Latin — calls to mind Ave Maria—hence Hail Mary. The big markets for them are in Hare Street and Brick Lane.”

“And no, I’m not Catholic,” said McKee. “Their standards are too high.” She faced Christina. “I’m sorry to burst in on you this way, but our daughter — well, you remember I thought she was dead? We have it from a reliable source that she’s alive after all. Possibly living around Highgate.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Christina. “Can you find out exactly where she’s living? Could your ‘reliable source’ help?”

“Unhappily not.” She glanced toward Cayley, then back at Christina, and shrugged. “It was the old bawd Carpace, and she was a ghost when she told us as much as she did. And now she’s—” McKee made a diving gesture.

“Ah.” Christina nodded. “In the river with the rest of them.”

Mr. Crawford seemed surprised that Christina knew of such things.

Charles Cayley raised a hand, and Christina turned to him.

“Is — there more tea coming?” he asked.

“Yes, in a moment. Charles, this—”

“Spiritualism?” he said. “I assume? Christina, by the affection which I may be so bold as to say I hold for you — ah—”

McKee caught Christina’s eye and raised her eyebrows.

“—I have to remind you,” Cayley went on, and then he paused.

After a few seconds, McKee said, “Miss Rossetti, I apologize. John and I shouldn’t have interrupted. We can come back—”

“No, no,” said Cayley, “it’s I who should be—”

The front door latch rattled then, and heavy boots thumped on the hallway carpet.

That must be Gabriel, Christina thought. Maria would have been better.

And a moment later Gabriel appeared in the doorway, tossing aside a broad-brimmed hat and unwinding a straw-colored scarf from around his neck and looking more dissipated than ever — his dark hair was falling down in oily curls over his forehead, his eyes looked pouchy and sunken, and his cheeks around his goatee were bristly.

He cast an incurious glance over Christina’s guests, then said to her, “I’m thinking of fetching in a priest, a Catholic one. They’re the lads for exorcisms.”

“A priest,” said Christina, flustered, “might throw out the baby with the baptismal water. Oh dear, this is all so—”

“She’s alive, at least,” Gabriel went on. “At the moment. She even wants to go out to dinner tonight. But if we can’t detach the devil’s hooks—”

McKee had stood up, and Gabriel frowned at her.

McKee said, “Excuse me. But — could you — push your hair back?”

Gabriel opened his mouth, then shut it. “No,” he said finally.

“No,” said McKee, “you don’t have to, I know your voice too. I never forget a client. You’re the man who advised me to enroll at the Magdalen Penitentiary, one night seven years ago. It was in Mayfair, do you remember? You said the priests and sisters at Magdalen could help me … undo the bad connections I’d made.”

“Oh, Gabriel,” said Christina reproachfully. “Mayfair? The Argyle Rooms, the Alhambra? Kate Hamilton’s on Prince’s Street?”

“No,” put in McKee, “I was trolling under Carpace’s colors.”

Christina turned to McKee. “North of the river in a borrowed dress? She must have trusted you, to let you wander so far from Griffin Street.”

Both Cayley and the Crawford fellow were looking from one speaker to the other in evident dismay.

“My young daughter,” said McKee, “is in the same peril as this woman you’re referring to, I believe. We’re talking about the Nephilim? ‘The giants that were in the earth in those days’? I agree with Sister Christina about the perils of calling in a priest.”

Gabriel was squinting at her. “Daughter?” he asked hollowly.

“By this man,” said McKee, waving toward Crawford. “Put your mind at ease — about that, at least.”

Crawford was still sitting on the sofa, and he and Gabriel exchanged an embarrassed and unfriendly glance.

The Rossettis’ housekeeper bustled in then with a tray on which sat a teapot and four cups.

“Mr. Gabriel!” she said. “I’ll fetch another cup.” She set the tray down and returned to the kitchen.

“Never mind, Lillibet,” Christina called after her. “Charles, I must beg your forgiveness here, I—”

“Yes,” said Cayley, getting to his feet. “We can talk another time.” His face was red, and his bald scalp was gleaming. “I fear that your volunteer work among the lower — excuse me — among the unfortunate, has — has—”

“Lower—?” began Crawford, getting to his feet; Christina sent him an imploring glance, and he sat down again, grumbling.

Gabriel laughed, and it pained Christina to see her youthful brother for a moment in that prematurely sagging face.

“If you will all forgive me,” said Cayley in his piping voice, “it’s been a — I certainly never meant to — but I’m afraid I must—” He bowed and scuttled out of the room.

Nobody spoke until they heard the front door click shut and the knock of boots descending the front steps.

“Poor Charles,” said Christina.

“The man’s an idiot,” said Gabriel. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Is that right? Half past noon?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Crawford sourly. “My watch is in fragments down a well.”

Gabriel nodded. “That’s the spirit. It’s damnably sunny out, but I think we should take this conference to the park, so as not to disturb Lillibet with talk of devils.”

“Lucky thing for you that you had that watch,” McKee told Crawford as she got to her feet. “Or the devils would be digesting you right now.”

Crawford shrugged and nodded. “Both of us,” he said.

Christina sighed. “Let me get my coat and a bonnet.”

“And a parasol,” advised Gabriel, picking up his scarf and hat. “The sun is like a lion.”

REGENT’S PARK, TWO STREETS away to the west, was a landscape of black trees and iron fences standing up in a carpet of old snow under a deep blue sky. The road linking the inner and outer circles was marked by a few tracks of hooves and boot prints, but aside from Crawford and McKee and the two Rossettis, the only figure in the landscape was a man walking an ungainly dog a hundred yards away.

As if the dark old houses they had passed had been huge, blank-eyed brickwork heads poked up out of the pavements to spy on them, they had not spoken until they were past even the tall white Cumberland Terrace houses on the park’s eastern boundary and had crossed the outer circle and were well out onto the park grounds.

Crawford couldn’t even see any birds, and McKee’s linnet was silent — the only sounds were the wind in the bare branches and the crunch and slither of boot soles on the snow-drifted gravel.

Finally Christina’s brother Gabriel spoke. “It’s my wife — she seems to be dying, and I don’t want—” He waved helplessly.

“You don’t want her to come back,” suggested McKee, staring down at the path as she walked. “If she does die.”

“What I want is for her not to die,” Gabriel said angrily. “This isn’t a — a game, you know — we’re talking about a woman’s life. And an unborn child’s too — she’s apparently—”

“Believe me,” interrupted McKee in a flat voice as cold as the wind, “I know it’s not a game. You brought this to me, like a disease, and now my daughter is likely to die of it. I want her not to die too — but if she does, I want to see that she stays dead.”

“You said,” intervened Christina, blinking anxiously in the shadow of her parasol, “that your daughter might be living in Highgate.”

McKee nodded. “That’s what old Carpace’s ghost said. She said she had seen the girl in the cemetery — that the girl’s father was buried there.”

“Swallowed there,” Crawford corrected.

“Swallowed, buried,” said McKee impatiently. “And she brings him flowers.”

“Her father,” said Christina. “But I thought you, sir, were the child’s father?”

Crawford opened his mouth, intending to say allegedly, but instead simply said, “Yes.”

“Ghosts don’t lie,” said Christina thoughtfully, at which Gabriel snorted.

“Adoptive father, I imagine,” said McKee. “The … the vampire.”

“Oh,” said Christina. “Of course.”

“Our father is buried at Highgate,” said Gabriel.

“He’s safe,” said Christina. “He died clean, with God’s name on his lips and in the midst of garlic and cold iron.”

Crawford glanced at Christina Rossetti — Sister Christina! — and wondered if this serious and respectable young lady might know even more about the occult world than McKee did.

“And we know,” said Gabriel, “who the vampire father is.” His eyes glittered under the broad brim of his hat.

Christina sighed, blowing away a plume of steamy breath, and Gabriel gave her a look that seemed almost reproachful.

“Over there,” said Christina, pointing with her free hand away across the white-dusted dead grass plain to the right, “are the zoo cages.”

She stepped off the path and onto the faintly crunching grass. The skirts of her coat flapped around her boots.

“We’ve got more privacy out here,” said Gabriel impatiently, following her.

“There are cages outside the wall,” Christina said, “on the west side. They’re empty in the winter, nobody’d be out there on a day like this.”

McKee and Crawford looked at each other and shrugged, then trudged after the Rossettis.

“Sister Christina,” called McKee, “who is the vampire father?”

Christina swung her parasol aside and looked back over her shoulder, still walking. “You deserve to know, since one of us woke him and the other brought him to you. It’s our uncle, my mother’s brother. His name is—”

“Best left unsaid!” interrupted Gabriel. “Even in daylight.”

“Your uncle?” exclaimed McKee, stopping on the grass.

“Yes.” Christina halted too, and she tucked the parasol handle under her arm to take hold of McKee’s hand; and with the forefinger of her gloved right hand she began stroking McKee’s palm. After a moment Crawford realized that Christina was drawing a series of letters.

“I know you can read, Adelaide,” said Christina. “Can you remember that name?”

“Yes,” said McKee, frowning down at Christina’s scrawling finger, “yes, but if it’s—”

“He killed himself in 1821.” Christina released McKee’s hand and resumed walking, gripping the parasol handle again. “He had tried to enter a monastery, but they wouldn’t have him — I can’t blame them, since by that time he was—” She waved vaguely.

“Pledged to death and eventual resurrection,” suggested McKee with a brittle smile as she stepped after her.

Gabriel was striding along beside Christina, but Crawford took a moment to look around at the desolate park grounds before rejoining his peculiar companions. The man with the dog had passed them, well to the north — Crawford noticed that the dog appeared to be tied up in some sort of flapping shawl against the cold.

Christina was still leading the way across the frostbitten grass, and Crawford saw her bonneted head nod. “Not the resurrection Christ bought for us.”

“I knew,” began McKee, and Crawford could see that she was speaking carefully, “that Mr. Rossetti here—”

“Call me Gabriel,” said Christina’s brother in a tight voice; and Crawford remembered, with a surprising surge of jealousy, what McKee had said yesterday morning when she had asked Crawford to call her by her first name: I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced. Of course she and this Gabriel fellow with his foolish hat had been similarly … introduced.

McKee went on in a tight voice, “I knew that Gabriel had brought — your uncle’s! — attentions to me, and to my daughter. But do you say you — woke him?”

Christina’s shoulders rose and fell. “I did. I was fourteen.”

“Our father forced it on her,” said Gabriel gruffly, taking his sister’s arm as they all trudged across the grass.

“At first I thought it was our uncle’s ghost,” said Christina. “Well, it was, in a way. I invited him in because I felt sorry for him, and he was family … but it wasn’t really him, not really.”

“Our father,” said Gabriel, “had a little statue that he’d acquired in Italy. No bigger than your thumb. We always, even as children, knew it was alive.”

“It wore the doomed soul of our uncle,” Christina went on, “but it was one of the — a dormant, petrified, condensed member of the — well, you know the term that Gabriel would advise me not to say out loud here. The tribe that troubles us, the giants that were in the earth in those days.”

The Nephilim, thought Crawford with a shudder. They were mentioned in the Old Testament book of Genesis, and the writer of the book of Numbers described encountering them: we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.

The man with the dog had reached the eastern edge of the park, but he had paused in the outer circle road.

“That,” said McKee, “would have been in about 1850?”

“1845,” said Christina, glancing back at her in evident surprise.

“They had been dormant then for twenty or thirty years,” said McKee. “From about 1850 onward, they’ve been active again.” To Gabriel she said, “It was 1855 when you brought your uncle to me.” She shook her head and gave Crawford a wide-eyed look. “Was I right about coming here? We’ve found the monster’s very family!”

“It’s true,” said Christina mournfully.

Crawford was looking at her, and so he didn’t see why Gabriel had abruptly leaped to one side and drawn a revolver from under his coat and McKee was suddenly crouching and holding a short-bladed knife; both of them were squinting past Crawford to the east.

Crawford spun in that direction, losing his footing and falling to one knee as his left hand tore open his coat so that his right could dive into his waistcoat pocket.

The dog in the shawl was sixty feet away and rushing directly at them, tearing up spurts of snow and dirt — and somehow its lunging head was entirely wrapped in gray cloth—

— Crawford’s vision narrowed in shrill shock when he realized that it wasn’t a dog at all, but a little misshapen human figure, wrapped in cloth like a mummy, its knees and elbows flexing rapidly like spider limbs as it ate up the intervening ground—

A loud bang like a hammer on stone numbed Crawford’s ears, and the rushing figure did a ragged backflip, spasmodically ripping at the ground even as it still slid heavily toward them; Gabriel’s second shot stopped its slide, and his third and fourth shots shook the creature violently. Faint echoes of the shots were batted back from the distant Cumberland Terrace housefronts.

Crawford stared, the wind cold on his wide eyes — the thing’s limbs were retracting; it was shrinking inside its flapping cloth coverings even as it thrashed furiously.

The frozen ground seemed to shiver, and for a moment the ringing in Crawford’s ears seemed to be a remote chorus climbing through impossibly high notes to inaudibility.

Gabriel fired his revolver twice more at the heaving pile of cloth; bits of thread and sprays of black dirt flew away from the ragged holes.

The man who had been walking with the thing was running up now, but he was running a good deal more slowly than the creature had, and he was still twenty yards distant. He was carrying a black angular case, and Crawford wondered if he were a doctor. Far too late, he thought.

Crawford looked back at the women. Both were standing and staring at the subsiding cloth-covered mound. McKee caught his eye and actually grinned, tensely.

Crawford found that he couldn’t smile. His face was stinging with sweat, and his hands were shaking.

Gabriel lowered his pistol, panting hoarsely. He glanced at Crawford beside him and nodded. “Garlic in the bottle?”

Crawford could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears, but he nodded.

“Not useless, if you could have got it open in time.”

“Is it dead?” Crawford asked, sure that he was speaking too loudly but wanting to hear his own voice.

“No,” said Christina, stepping up beside her brother. “It will have burrowed into the earth, I imagine.”

“Injured, though, definitely,” said Gabriel. He wiped his mouth with his free hand.

“Can you reload?” asked Crawford, nodding toward the man who was striding toward them now. It was, Crawford saw, an old man in a black Chesterfield overcoat and a black silk hat, and the object he was carrying was a violin case. All Crawford could make out of his face was a white beard and dark features — but he recognized him.

Apparently McKee did too. “I don’t think you’ll need to shoot him,” she said, though she had not yet put away her knife.

“It takes me half an hour to reload this,” Gabriel muttered. To Christina he added, “I shot that thing, did you see?”

The old man paused on the far side of the now-motionless lump of cloth on the frosty grass, and with the toe of his boot he flipped most of the fabrics aside. Underneath was a mound of fresh-churned dirt.

He looked up at the four people on the other side of the mound, and for a moment his scarred lips seemed to be sneering; then his lean brown face flexed in a wolfish smile.

“She’ll be a thing like a crab now,” he said. “No use digging for her; you won’t catch her and she’ll still weigh upward of two hundred pounds — you’d never lift her.”

“Who the bloody hell are you?” demanded Gabriel, still visibly shaky. “And what was that thing?”

Edward Trelawny shook his head impatiently. “Don’t waste my time. You know what it was, or you wouldn’t have had a gun loaded with silver bullets, now would you? Nothing else could have done that to her. Well, gold may be a better electrical conductor, but I doubt someone like you could afford gold bullets.” He laughed. “As to who I am, it’s better you don’t know, and I don’t want to know who you are. Even a captured mind can’t reveal what it’s never learned, right? If you all have any brains, you don’t know each other’s names either, but I suppose you haven’t any brains, walking around in a damn clump out here like red flags in front of a bull. Are you surprised that you drew the bitter attentions of”—he waved back toward the pile of dirt—“her?”

He made a tossing motion toward Crawford and McKee. “You two especially! You killed her Judas Goat last night — you might have had the sense to lay low.”

“By daylight—” began Crawford weakly.

“I knew you were a fool the first time I laid eyes on you, sitting in that ring of failed poets. Daylight. She’s mighty hampered in daylight, but not immobile. She’d have torn your empty heads off.”

Christina surprised Crawford by stepping forward and saying, “You can call me Diamonds.”

“Hah!” said Gabriel. “At that rate I’m Hearts.”

Christina gave McKee a frail smile. “A childhood game,” she said. “We have a sister we called Clubs and a brother we called Spades.”

“You,” said Trelawny, pointing at McKee, “I’ll call Rahab.”

McKee blinked and frowned, and Crawford guessed that she wasn’t entirely pleased to be given the name of the Biblical ex-prostitute who betrayed Jericho to the Hebrews; but she nodded.

She pointed at the violin case in the old man’s hand. “Are you a musician?”

“Not me, no.” Trelawny turned to Crawford and went on, “You’re a medical man, I heard, so I’ll call you Medicus. In fact, you look uncannily like a medical man I knew in Italy years ago, but we’ll let that go.”

“If you like,” said Crawford. His father had been a physician, and had been in Italy in the 1820s, but Crawford couldn’t recall his parents mentioning Edward Trelawny.

“And call me Samson,” Trelawny said. “My spiritual hair has almost completely grown back, I believe. I hope.” He glanced at the scattered cloths and the mound of dirt on the grass, and then looked up at all four of them. “You’ve left me unchaperoned, for a few days at least. It may be that we can help one another. Where were you walking to, so carefree?”

Christina nodded toward the long wall at the north end of the lawn. “The zoo cages outside the wall,” she said, “on the north side of the outer circle just below the canal. They’re for cassowaries and zebras, and they’re empty in the winter. If we could find one around the back where nobody’s likely to be, on a day like this, and get into it, with cold iron bars on all sides—”

“Ah!” said Trelawny. “I could see from the start that you’re the only one of your lot with any sense, Diamonds. The iron bars, yes, they should hide our auras just as a Faraday cage deflects electric fields — block our radiances, keep the other big one from sniffing us.”

“The other big one,” said Gabriel.

“We can discuss it when we’re caged,” said Trelawny, “like a pack of sickly cassowaries.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHAT IS ‘THE other big one’?” asked McKee.

They had found a row of empty and unlocked cages well west of the offices of the superintendent and ducked into the farthest one, pulling the barred door nearly closed behind them. Bare trees hid them from most of the park.

“If anyone should stroll by,” advised Trelawny, “all of us just make hooting sounds and hop up and down. Scratch.”

Gabriel giggled. “One of us sh-should — be outside to t-take money,” he stammered, and then he coughed and scowled around at the others.

They were shaded from the bright sunlight by a wooden roof that extended out past the rows of vertical bars confining them, and the wind that whistled through seemed much colder than it had outside. The black bars were ornate with stylized ironwork vines and flowers at the tops, but the cage was no more than ten feet square, and though wide shelves had been bolted to the bars at various heights, all five of them remained standing. Any smells the cage might once have had were lost in the stinging astringence of the icy air. Crawford thought of taking off his hat, but neither of the other two men did, so he left it on.

“The other one,” said Trelawny, sliding his violin case onto a shelf and pulling a cigar from inside his coat. Crawford noticed that the old man wore no gloves or scarf. “Miss B., who you just now shot, has a partner. He was a doctor too,” the old man said, nodding to Crawford, “when he was a normally living man. Name of Polidori. I never met him, but we had friends in common.”

Christina had collapsed her parasol and laid it on one of the metal shelves, and now leaned back against the shelf and made the sign of the cross. Gabriel rolled his eyes. McKee glanced at the palm of her gloved hand.

“You know of him,” said Trelawny, raising his white eyebrows as he struck a match to his cigar.

“He is,” said Gabriel, “the one who menaces my wife and unborn child — and the daughter of,” he added with a sideways wave, “of Rahab and Medicus here.” Then a thought seemed to strike him. “Could they,” Gabriel went on quickly, and Crawford was surprised to see sweat on Gabriel’s face now, in spite of the freezing breeze, “Miss B. and Polidori — could it ever happen that they might share possession of a person?”

Trelawny cocked his head at him. “I suppose so, if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.”

Gabriel’s expression didn’t change, but Crawford got the impression that some effort had been required for it not to.

“Who is this Miss B.?” asked Christina. “How was she quickened?”

Trelawny puffed smoke for several seconds, staring at Christina. “You seem to know how the Polidori creature was quickened,” he said. “I’ll want to hear about that. But — as for Miss B. — I’m afraid it was my fault.”

The breeze whistled through the bars, and flurries of snow spun around their boots.

“Your fault,” prompted McKee impatiently, hugging herself in her coat.

Trelawny eyed his companions speculatively and spoke around the cigar. “Do you all know about statues? Living statues?”

“A little,” said Christina softly.

Trelawny went on, “I have made it possible — well, others forced it on me, actually — I have made it possible again to do what Deucalion and Pyrrha did, in the old Greek stories: establish a link between humans and the stony tribe, those pre-Adamite creatures that the ancient Hebrews called the Nephilim.”

A moment went by in which no one spoke.

“Forced it on you,” said Crawford, remembering the story his parents had told him.

“I’d say forced is too mild a word, to be honest,” said Trelawny testily. “A mountain bandit who hoped to establish an alliance with these creatures arranged for me to be shot in the back — and one of the two balls the gun was loaded with was a tiny statue. It broke, bouncing around among my bones, and I spat half of it out, along with several teeth. The other ball was silver, and it’s lodged in me somewhere, and it kept me safe for a long time. Balanced. Net zero.”

Ash blew away from the tip of his cigar, and the coal glowed as he inhaled. “But — the problem is — the other half of the stone ball, the little statue”—he lifted his chin and patted his collar—“is, I’m afraid … growing. And as it grows, the Nephilim become stronger.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s the word? Rosetta!”

“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.”

“Somehow,” agreed Gabriel, rocking on his heels.

McKee scowled at both of them, but a reluctant smile was tugging at the corners of her lips. “You could have interrupted him to do it.”

“You always were headstrong, Adelaide,” Christina said with a sigh. “He might be an ally, and his devil isn’t the one that threatens us.”

Gabriel’s face was blank.

“No,” said McKee, turning on her, “your uncle is that. And he and my daughter both seem to be connected to Highgate Cemetery. You know more about all this, I see, than you could possibly tell us now — come there with us.”

Gabriel blew out a breath and shook his head. “My sister isn’t well; it’s out of the question.”

“I really couldn’t do it,” said Christina. “But I can tell you any number of—”

Crawford interrupted her with an involuntary gasp. The figure he had been watching was closer now, and there was something wrong with its silhouette.

Its wide leather hat, as wide as a horse collar, had no crown and seemed to rest directly on the figure’s neck, with no room for a head in between.

The others had followed his wide-eyed gaze, and now Christina waved urgently.

“He’s blind,” she whispered. “Complete silence, all of you.”

Crawford’s ears were ringing shrilly though almost inaudibly, and he could feel his heart thudding in his chest.

Below the impossible hat the figure wore an old brown coat that trailed on the gravel of the outer circle road, and the thing was meandering back and forth in the road like someone looking for a dropped coin, but its random-looking course kept bringing it toward the row of cages. Its harsh breathing was audible already, and soon Crawford could hear it muttering to itself in a hoarse voice as resonant as someone speaking from the bottom of a well, though he couldn’t make out words.

McKee’s hand was gripping Crawford’s upper arm tightly. He glanced at her, but she was staring out white-faced at the advancing thing.

The brim of the hat flapped as the creature spoke, and Crawford’s heart seemed to freeze solid when he realized that the thing’s mouth was as wide as the hat brim, a yard across at least. He looked away, fearing that it might sense and track his gaze, but not before he had glimpsed two long rows of shadowed teeth and a tongue like a black sunfish.

Its words were audible now: “My darling, my Diamonds! Do you move so fast? My sister is hurt, away under the ground in the dark; help me find her. Touch me — where are you? Take my hand! Don’t you hate the sun? You know what those children sing? ‘When the sky began to roar, / ’Twas like a lion at the door!’”

Its long arms were extended as its shoes scuffled and scraped across the gravel, and its hands were hidden under the long, flapping sleeves. The breeze seemed to have halted, frozen like glass.

Crawford was watching the thing only from the corner of his eye, and so he saw Christina open her mouth when it became clear that the thing’s wobbling course would take it past the cage toward the canal, with yards to spare; but Gabriel gripped her shoulder, and she closed her mouth and gave him a guilty look. Gabriel’s free hand was visibly a fist in his coat pocket, no doubt gripping his now-empty revolver.

None of the four moved their booted feet on the sandy cage floor, but their heads slowly turned to watch the thing’s hunched back and flopping hat recede in the direction Trelawny had taken.

Several minutes passed before the shambling figure disappeared among the elms to the west, but none of the people in the cage spoke until it was out of sight, though Christina began panting.

“That was your damned—” said Gabriel to Christina, “your — what did you call him?”

“Mouth Boy,” said Christina breathlessly. “But it was Uncle Polidori, wearing the form of my childhood nightmare.” She rubbed her eyes with trembling hands.

“Yes.” Gabriel gave her an angry glance. “I don’t know what you see in him.”

She squinted at him. “Yes, you do.”

“I’d have shot him if I’d had a seventh bullet.”

Christina didn’t reply. She stretched and retrieved her parasol and stepped to the cage gate. “We should separate, all be indoors by sunset.” To McKee she said, “When can we meet at Highgate Cemetery?”

“You can’t!” said Gabriel. “You’re not strong—”

“Tomorrow,” said McKee.

“I will,” Christina insisted to Gabriel. “It’s because I woke our uncle — and because you … brought him to Adelaide — that her daughter’s soul is in danger. It may be that we can find his statue, and—”

Gabriel gave her a look that seemed both cynical and pleading.

“—and destroy it, and him,” Christina went on firmly, “and free Adelaide’s little girl. And you and me.” She clasped both hands on the parasol handle, possibly to keep them from shaking. “It doesn’t matter if I — what my natural feelings for him still are.”

After a grudging pause, Gabriel said, “You don’t mention Lizzie.”

Christina touched his arm. “And go some way toward saving Lizzie too,” she said gently. “You believe she’s shared by these two devils?”

“I — damn it, yes. And either one could have assumed my form and … potency. I can’t know which of them it was who—”

Crawford thought about his practice and his rent, then sighed and quietly said to McKee, “After noon, please.”

McKee nodded.

Christina turned to Gabriel. “I think you’ll come too.”

Gabriel almost seemed ready to spit; but, “You’re my sister,” he said, “and their child might just as easily have been my daughter. And it is conceivable we might be able to do something to help Lizzie.” He heaved a windy sigh. “Yes, I’ll go along.”

Crawford forced himself not to scowl. Damn the man, he thought. Might just as easily have been his daughter indeed!

“Get your gun loaded again,” McKee told Gabriel. “Load two, if you have them.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE DINNER AT La Sablonniere in Leicester Square was, Gabriel thought cautiously, going as well as could be expected. He was more comfortable with the informal dinners he served for friends at home—“nothing but oysters and of course the seediest of clothes,” as he often specified in his invitations — but this dressing up for an elegant restaurant was what Lizzie had apparently wanted.

It helped that the young poet Swinburne was there. Swinburne was twenty-five but looked a malnourished sixteen, and his wild mane of kinky hair was the same carroty color as Lizzie’s, and his twitchy cheerfulness often sparked a like response in Lizzie.

Lizzie had in fact vacillated all evening between giddy hilarity and a wooden silence, and she had drunk several glasses of Haut-Brion Blanc but had eaten only a few bites of her supreme de volaille, a chicken breast in a white sauce; Gabriel recognized all this as the effects of her damned laudanum.

Their table for three was beside a window overlooking the streetlamp-dotted darkness of Leicester Square, and now Lizzie had pulled off her shawl to polish the glass, and her bare shoulders glowed too pale in the glare of the restaurant’s wall-mounted gas jets.

“There’s a … new building there,” she said. “In the middle of the square.”

Swinburne, not entirely sober himself, goggled at the glass but apparently couldn’t see beyond his own reflection and the steam of his breath.

Gabriel leaned forward and squinted. The high dome and pillared entrance to the Wyld’s Globe exhibit was the only building visible out there in the dark. “Nothing new that I can see,” he said.

“That dome,” Lizzie said. “Wasn’t it grass there…?”

“That’s been there for eleven years, Guggums. Ever since the Great Exhibition.”

“Is it a church?”

“My sort of church,” said Swinburne, slouching back in his upholstered chair and reaching for the decanter of claret. “The world, introverted.”

“It’s a giant globe,” said Gabriel patiently, “turned inside out. You go in and you can see all the seas and continents around you.”

“Turned inside out,” echoed Lizzie. “I’m turned inside out. Everything around me is my own grief and loss, and inside I’m just an empty street, an empty building.”

Gabriel wished she weren’t so devoted to poetry; she wrote a lot of it, and it was, frankly, pedestrian stuff, though Swinburne loyally claimed to admire her verses.

“Nonsense, Gug,” Gabriel said. “You’re ill, it colors your mood. I think a crème brûlée and a glass of sauternes—”

Lizzie was frowning and shaking her head. “If the globe is inside out, where’s God? Rise up from one place and soon you’d only bump your head against another! And Hell — under the surface — is infinite! Don’t bury me!”

“For God’s sake, Gug, pipe down! Nobody’s going to bury you, you’re not dying. Algy, she listens to you, tell her she’s not dying.”

Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Chatham Place, and he and Lizzie were forever reading to each other, or playing with the cats, or jointly composing nonsense verses and wrestling for possession of the pen as inspiration struck one or the other of them.

Swinburne blinked at her now over the rim of his wine glass. He lowered it and said, “Don’t die, Lizzie darling. Who else could I find who doesn’t despise me?”

She sniffed and shook her head. “It’s the ones who love us that are the peril. ‘And well though love reposes, in the end it is not well.’”

Now she was quoting an unpublished poem of Swinburne’s. The young man, whose red hair was now sticking out in all directions, pursed his lips in wry acknowledgment. “But Gabriel and I love you. We’re no peril.”

“You don’t love me as much as two others do,” she whispered.

Gabriel shivered. Two, he thought; and he remembered Trelawny’s words this afternoon: … if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.

Lizzie looked back out the window, and tears stood on her eyelashes as she kissed one finger and then stroked it down the glass. “Oh, do you see her? She followed us, but she won’t come in where it’s warm.”

“Who?” asked Swinburne, to Gabriel’s alarm.

“Don’t let her get started on—” he began, but it was too late.

Lizzie was sobbing, and Gabriel pushed his chair back and stood up, waving to the waiter.

“My daughter,” wailed Lizzie, “dead but weeping, immortal but starving!” Gabriel had strode around to her side of the table and was pulling her shawl across her shoulders and shushing her, but she went on, “Is my second child to join her out there?”

Gabriel was peripherally aware of eyeglasses and red lips and mustaches turned toward them from the tables nearby, and for a moment a smell of wet clay seemed to eclipse the aromas of beef and cigar smoke and wine sauces, but he had got Lizzie to her feet and was concentrating on guiding her toward the dining room door; he could hear Swinburne’s boots rapping on the polished wood floor behind him.

Gabriel dug a five-pound note out of his pocket and thrust it at the wide-eyed waiter, who hurried to fetch their hats and coats; and after what seemed like an infernal eternity of tugging at sleeves and scarves and glove cuffs, they were at last stepping across the foyer and he was pushing open the heavy front door. Wintry air numbed his cheeks and stung his teeth as he whistled to a cab standing at the curb a dozen yards away, and when the driver shed his blanket and shook the reins, Gabriel turned to Swinburne over Lizzie’s shaking shoulder.

“Sorry, Algy,” he said, “she’s—”

“Take care of her,” said Swinburne, shivering in his too-large coat. “And thank you for dinner.” Then he nodded and set off walking away down Panton Street.

It was difficult to get Lizzie into the cab, as she kept looking yearningly back at the restaurant. Probably wanting us to wait for our dead daughter, thought Gabriel grimly as he pushed her up the step; either that or she’s reconsidering the crème brûlée.

“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING, Christina?”

“Nothing,” snapped Christina crossly, rolling the pen between her fingers. “Nothing!”

The room was too warm and reeked of William’s tarry latakia tobacco. The tassels that dangled from the runner on the fireplace mantel were throwing their usual shadow pattern on the high ceiling, and to Christina, as she looked up in frustration, the little wavering Y-shaped figures looked like tiny men clinging to a cliff edge over an inferno.

Like Catholic souls clutching the last edge of Purgatory, she thought. Filthy Romish superstition!

Her bearded, bald-headed brother blinked at her in surprise but took no offense. He never did. He had only been home for half an hour, his job at the Inland Revenue offices in Somerset House having kept him late, and he had been scribbling busily in a notebook before he had noticed her scowling over her papers at the slant-front desk below the old portrait of their uncle.

“I’m sorry,” Christina said. William was the only one of the four siblings who provided any substantial household money — Maria’s Bible classes hardly brought in a hundred pounds a year, and Gabriel’s income from his paintings was erratic and carelessly spent — and William never complained about the fact that the whole family lived off his salary. He wrote poetry too — he had probably been writing verses just now — though it was all hopelessly pedantic and uninspired.

Christina absentmindedly blew a strand of hair out of her face. “I’m trying to continue the story I burned last year.”

“‘Folio Q,’” said William, putting down his notebook and taking off his spectacles. “Continue it? Have you written it out again? I thought it was very good.”

“I know you did. But I didn’t write it.” She took a deep breath. “He did,” she said, pointing her pen up at the portrait above the desk. “Through me, through my passive hand.”

He frowned. “Do you mean you were inspired—”

“I mean he — wrote — it. His ghost did. I was in a sort of trance, and I didn’t know what I’d written — what my hand had written — until I read it.”

“Ah, you mean automatic writing,” William said, nodding in sudden comprehension. “Really! That’s why you burned it. But that’s fascinating! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You? You’re so skeptical—”

“Only about obvious superstitions,” he protested. Like Christianity, Christina thought sourly. “But,” he went on, “never about possibly valid scientific phenomena. Some intriguing work is being done these days in spiritualism.”

“Well, he’s giving me nothing tonight.” She tossed the pen onto the paper and glanced irritably up at the portrait. John Polidori, with his antique collar and his curly black hair and his dark eyes peering off to the side, for once just looked stupid and cunning.

“Was it — important? That he do?”

“Yesterday he was writing about Lizzie, through me. He knew, or said, that she’s … expecting again. I need to know, from him, what her prognosis is.”

William tamped the smoldering tobacco in his pipe. “I hope she recovers from this … nervous prostration of hers,” he said, puffing smoke. “Gabriel loves her.”

“So should we all. She’s family now.”

“Why don’t you just visit her? And why would our departed uncle be particularly informed about her condition?”

“He’d know better than anyone,” said Christina. “He’s what’s making her sick.” With, she thought, perhaps some assistance from the historical Boadicea, God help us.

William pursed his lips and stroked his beard. “Ghosts, if indeed they exist, aren’t supposed to be able to hurt people. All the evidence indicates—”

“There’s fresh evidence. Firsthand evidence.”

William blinked. “What’s — going on?”

“She — he — oh, hang on a moment.” Christnia stood up and crossed to the mantel, where she had left the rolling pencil disk Gabriel had tossed to her yesterday. She picked it up and hurried back to the desk.

“I forgot about this — Gabriel told me to use it.”

“It looks like one of those children’s toys that spin,” said William.

“Lizzie was using it to communicate with a dead friend,” she said without looking up from her paper. “I saw the sheet she used — apparently you write out a question first — I could ask Uncle John to continue—”

But as soon as she set the disk on the paper and laid two fingers on it, it started moving; a tingle passed through her chest, and the fingers of her free hand stretched out and then clenched in a fist. She heard William stand up from his chair, but she didn’t look away from the pencil line already being traced.

When the disk paused, it had written,

get it out

“Get it out?” said William, standing now behind her shoulder. “That’s not clear.”

“Shh.” Christina began awkwardly trying to write a question with the upright pencil, but the thing was moving again.

river closest meet tell you

The writing was faint and loopy, and William squinted at it. “Riven closet?” he asked.

“‘River closest.’ I think he wants me to meet him by the river,” said Christina in a quavering voice. “I won’t go. I won’t.”

William straightened up. “You believe he would hurt you?”

“Well, no. Not me. I believe he loves me.”

She started to say something else, but the disk was moving again:

need you always

She inhaled sharply, then leaned down and said to the pencil, “Where by the river?”

find you I will

Christina let her gaze fall from the paper on the desk to her shoes. She would need to put on boots, and a coat and hat and gloves — at least the hateful sun had set — and find a cab; Gabriel lived right on the river, perhaps he would not mind letting her spend the night there, save her the cold trip home — of course she would want to come home—

The disk jiggled under her fingers and wrote,

my dear ones my francesca

William was peering at it. “I don’t think…” he began slowly, but the disk was moving again:

christina vivace mia

“… that that’s our uncle,” William finished.

“No,” said Christina, careful to keep any disappointment out of her voice or manner. “No, it’s… Papa.”

“Why is he writing in English?”

Christina recalled the conversation she’d had with her father seventeen years ago, when he had let her take the tiny Polidori statue. “I think he uses English when he’s — ashamed of himself.”

“Wha — why should he be ashamed of himself?”

Because he used me, Christina thought, sacrificed my honor to his devil, in the hope that the devil would … restore his sight, his fortune, his youth. A dishonorable bargain, and one in which he was cheated to boot.

And she recalled what Trelawny had said this afternoon. “Ghosts are ashamed of being dead,” she said.

William stepped back to the center of the parlor. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, William, it’s—”

William, of course, with his generally mocking attitude, had never been told the story of Christina’s catastrophic intimacy with their father’s statue, and she didn’t want him to learn it tonight.

“It won’t happen unless I’m alone,” she said. “I’ll be safe — I’ll go to where they hire boats, by the Adelphi wharfs.”

William was frowning. “But I’m one of his children too. Why would he — he didn’t say that you had to come alone.”

“Dear William! I’m sorry. But this time it must be just me. You can contact him afterward, and meet him … or his ghost, at any rate.”

“But isn’t his ghost him?”

“Not … not much. Most of him will have gone on, though I know what you think about Heaven and Hell. This fraction of him might be — a Catholic might say that it was — his participation in Purgatory.”

“I — for God’s sake, it’s after nine o’clock, Christina! I insist on going with you.”

“If you do, nothing will happen. We’ll take an uneventful walk by the river and come home again. I’ll be perfectly safe alone, I promise you.” She smiled at him. “You know I’ll get my way in this.”

After another few seconds of frowning disapprovingly, William looked away. “Do you have money?” he asked in a flat voice. “You’ll want a cab both ways.”

“Well, if you could,” said Christina, mentally adding as always, “lend me a pound…?”

William pulled his coin purse from his waistcoat pocket, snapped it open, and handed her several coins.

“Even so,” he said gruffly, “tell him, if you would, that I — love him.” He grimaced. “If his ghost is there, and even if it’s not much of him.”

“I will!”

Christina kissed him on the cheek and hurried to the hall to get her things.

GABRIEL HAD TO TAKE most of Lizzie’s weight as they clumped and scuffled up the dark stairs at Chatham Place, and when he had sat her down on the bed and turned up the gas flame he wiped his face with a handkerchief. Laudanum and the closed windows gave the room a stuffy sickroom smell.

“It’s nine thirty,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve got to go.” On Monday nights he taught a drawing class at the Working Men’s College in Great Titchfield Street. “I’ll be back at eleven or so.”

“Is that tonight? Miss the class tonight,” she said, falling back exhaustedly across the bed. Her closed eyes were smudges of darkness. “I’m afraid he’ll come to me, or she will, if you’re gone.”

He or she, Gabriel thought. How are we to free her from two of them?

“I can’t,” he said. “The students will all be there.”

“Gabriel, I don’t want to have to — do what I’d have to do, to resist them!”

Gabriel forced himself not to roll his eyes in impatience. “You’re safe here, indoors in this house, and I’ll only be a couple of hours.”

“Bloody lot you know,” she muttered, turning toward the wall. Her dress was going to need pressing before she could wear it again.

“What was that?”

She rolled around to face him, her eyes wide with apparent fright. “Stay, Gabriel! I don’t want to be left with nothing but Walter’s counsel.”

“Walter! Walter is dead because your — your new lovers were jealous! Walter’s just a half-wit ghost now.” He blinked away tears impatiently. “Walter’s not the—father of your child.”

Lizzie shook herself and looked around the dim-lit room and absently smoothed out the pleats of her dress. Gabriel wearily recognized one of her abrupt changes of mood.

She muttered something of which he caught only the words my child.

“What?” he snapped.

She sighed, calm now. “Nothing. Go to your school. Your students matter more to you than I do.”

“Damn it, Guggums—”

“You were perfectly beastly to me at dinner.”

“I was—? Who was it made such a scene that we had to run out? Algy must think you’re insane.”

“Algy loves me like a sister. You love me as a model for pictures.” Gabriel started to object, but she interrupted, “Give me my laudanum bottle, and then go.”

“You’ve had quite enough of that damned stuff. You hardly know where you are these days. I don’t—”

She rolled her eyes and shifted on the bed as if to stand up. “Can’t you do even that for me? Never mind, I’ll get it for myself.”

Furiously, Gabriel snatched up the bottle and strode to the bed and shoved it into her hand. “Here,” he said, “take the lot!”

She was sobbing weakly behind him as he strode out the bedroom door and down the stairs.

CHRISTINA HAD HAD TO knock at the side window of the hansom cab on the corner, waking the cabbie, and now that she had climbed out at the river end of Villiers Street ten minutes later, he swung down from his perch at the back and stepped up into the cab again to resume his interrupted sleep.

“I’ll be right here when you’re ready to return,” he said gruffly, pocketing her shilling and pulling his collar up and his hat down. “Unless somebody hires me first.”

“I shall hope that you remain undiscovered,” said Christina, shivering in the chilly fog that swirled up the street from the river.

The cab’s right wheel was up over the curb on the pavement, below a dark building with a crane and a wide, shuttered door dimly visible overhead on the second floor, in a shadowed and mist-veiled corner of the street, and it seemed very possible that no late-night revelers would venture beyond the crowded, jostling cab stand under the streetlamp a dozen yards back up the street.

Even on this cold Monday night the fog glowed back there around a place called Gatti’s Music Hall, and a man was out front shouting through a speaking trumpet about the musical show inside, which was apparently the source of the occasional spirited chorus of “Hee-haw” that rang between the blurred buildings and out across the river.

Beyond the chest-high brick wall along the river-side lane, the river itself was invisible in what seemed to be a solid cloud descended out of the sky — and she remembered her father once saying that the clouds of night were not the same as the clouds of day.

On the far side of the river, she knew, were warehouses and the ironworks and the tall shot tower, where molten lead was dropped from a height into cold water to make the little balls men shot birds with, but tonight those places all might as well be on the moon — the river of fog seemed to extend out to the sky, and with an odd thrill she remembered her childhood dream of the Sea-People Chorus, the thousands of ghosts in the river waving jointless arms at the night sky.

She straightened her shoulders and began resolutely walking down the street in that direction, away from the lights and the noise.

On clear nights, visitors from the country might be waiting at the stairs by the seventeenth-century water gate, which was all that remained of the old York House, to hire a boat and see the sights along the river, but when Christina walked between the pillars and reached the top of the stairs, she saw only four or five watermen sitting in a half-walled shed down to her left, huddled around a couple of lanterns. Along the narrow, fading pier, their boats sat in the water like sleeping gulls.

The stone steps below the arches of the water gate were wet, and Christina gripped the marble rail with her gloved right hand as she cautiously descended. The night was suddenly quiet down here in the dimness — she could hear a bell ringing faintly out on the river, and she thought she could hear frogs croaking not far away. The fleeting scent of tobacco smoke made the air seem warmer.

“Be you wanting to cross, miss?” called one of the gray-bearded men in the shed. “It’s no night for it, even with the purl men still out, mad fools.”

Now that she had reached the desolate river shore below the steeply slanted masonry of the City’s edge, Christina was not anxious to look for a ghost, even or especially her father’s, and the phrase that sounded like “pearl men” had an unwelcomely macabre sound. She imagined pearl-eyed drowned mariners rowing boats out there in the dark, not needing sight on the infinite river.

“Pearl men?” she asked, shivering as she picked her way over half-seen gravel and sand toward the yellow light of the kerosene lanterns. The fog moving in off the river smelled of the sea, though the tide didn’t appear to be high.

“Purl men is beer sellers,” the man said, to Christina’s instant relief. “It’s their bells you hear out there, looking to be hailed by sailors on moored ships. Used to be they’d mix wormwood in the beer, called it purl, and the name’s stuck.” The man stood up from the wooden box he’d been sitting on, took a short clay pipe out of his mouth, and said, “I’m called Hake. Who be you lookin’ for, miss?”

She was standing now only a couple of yards from the open side of the shed, and the air on her cheeks was perceptibly warmer there, but the faces of the other watermen, all middle-aged or older, were still just noses and gray beards and wrinkled foreheads picked out against the darkness by the lantern glare.

“My name is… Christina.” She could see the cloud of her breath now. “Must I be looking for someone?”

“Oh, aye. Your dress and manner are modest, and you’re alone. You hear ’em all yonder,” he added, waving at the nighted river behind her.

Christina turned to peer uneasily down the invisible shoreline.

“All I hear is frogs.”

One of the other men laughed or coughed. “Ain’t frogs,” he said.

“Nights like this,” said old Hake kindly, “fine folk sometimes come down here, not to hire a boat.”

“Nobody comes to hire a boat,” growled another bony old fellow. “Not since the new London Bridge.”

“Sure enough,” agreed Hake. “We’re well after being ghosts ourselves. The old bridge, gone these thirty years, had nineteen arches, and you needed a licensed waterman to shoot any one of them, but this new bridge has got only five arches, all very wide — a child could row you through ’em.”

“Almost ghosts yourselves,” echoed Christina cautiously.

“Aye,” said Hake with a nod, “there’s no apprentices to speak of anymore. Soon enough we’ll be out there in the dark on the other side of the stairs, with none anymore manning this pier to listen to us.” He smiled at her through his gray beard. “Who were you looking for?”

Feeling dizzy at doing it, Christina answered him honestly. “My father — he—”

“I’m sorry to hear about it, miss.” He stepped past her, his boots crunching in wet gravel, and beckoned her to follow. “When did he pass on?”

Christina fell into step beside him as they plodded away from the lantern light.

“Eight years ago.”

Hake stopped. “Did you say eight years? I’m sorry, but it’s not likely that he’d be still—”

“He contacted me, tonight. He asked me to meet him by the river.”

Hake shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll stop here, miss, and let you go farther. Not more than twenty paces past the stairs, mind, or you’ll be in grievous mud.”

“In grievous mud,” echoed Christina, stepping forward away from him across the wet sand and gravel, into the dark mist. The light from the lanterns behind her glittered faintly on the tops of the closest sand ripples, and she tried to step on those.

When her eyes adjusted to the faint gray luminescence of the fog, she became aware of several sets of abandoned-looking stairs fretting the patchwork stone wall to her right, and the river on her left was nothing but remote bells and vague splashing sounds at indeterminate distances; she believed she was somewhere between the Scotland Yard coal wharf and the Adelphi terrace houses, but the real world seemed to lie very far away behind her.

Never mind ghosts, she thought — there are probably thieves and footpads along this Godforsaken strip of the bottom of nowhere. I should go back to Hake and his companions, back to the sleepy cabbie, back to poor William with his wretched poetry in the warm parlor at home.

Damn you, Papa, for — but she cut the thought short.

And then she heard a whisper to her left: “Christina!”

She halted, and then gingerly stepped out into the river shallows, hoping her boots were waterproof. “Papa?”

Through the blurring mist she could see that there was something like a small dolphin or huge catfish lying in the shallows, panting visibly. Tentacles growing out of its face curled and splashed.

She heard water trickling, and then saw that the thing had a bony hinged arm too, with wet fingers on the end of it.

“Take my hand,” it wheezed.

Christina forced herself not to step back; but in a tight voice she said, “No.”

“My fault,” whispered the creature that was her father’s ghost. The arm fell back into the water with a splash. “Gabriel’s daughter — your lives — your soul. Looking at me? Don’t look. I stay on the bottom most days — all fear one another — river worms now.”

“William,” she said helplessly, “said to tell you he loves you.”

The creature groaned softly.

It occurred to Christina that she would be able to bear this for only a few more seconds.

“What did you want to tell me?” Her mouth was full of saliva, and she swallowed and gagged. “You asked me to meet you here.”

“Cut yourself?” said the fish-thing on a rising, whistling note. “On a rock? You could. Give your poor father a few drops of your living blood?”

This time she did step back. “No. Was that all you wanted to say to me?”

“No, no, I’m sorry, forgive me: don’t look at me. No, I wanted to say — choke it. It choked me.”

Icy water abruptly invaded the toe of Christina’s left boot, and her whole body shuddered at the shock. She gasped, “Choke what, Papa?”

“Statue, the uncle, of yours, my Francesca’s brother! Moony knows how. Save your souls; undo it all, then I can save mine.”

The freezing water quickly spread under the sole of her foot; her toes were already numb. “Papa, where is it?”

The fish-thing blew out spray, though its breath didn’t steam. “Here,” it rasped, “damn you, here! No, not here — in my throat. My heart clenched, I was dying — I thought Polidori would save me, immortal — I meant to swallow it — but — just gasping, choking.”

For the moment she forgot about her foot and her lonely and gloomy surroundings. “You choked on it?”

“Choke him. Moony knows how.” The thing thrashed clumsily, rolling out toward deeper water. Its wide ragged mouth was toward the foggy sky, and it wheezed, “Ugly, crushed, blind — I know — sorry — this waits for you all too, remember.”

Then it seemed to suffer some sort of fit, and went spasming and splashing out of sight into the fog; and it must have sunk, for the scratching breath and the splashing ceased.

“Papa…!” whispered Christina, all alone in the cold on the narrow dark shore.

Then she reminded herself that she was thirty-one now, not fourteen anymore; and she was likely to catch pneumonia if she didn’t get into dry slippers soon.

Tears were cold on her cheeks. She turned and began plodding back toward the lights of the watermen.

IT WAS ELEVEN THIRTY when Gabriel unlocked the street door at 14 Chatham Place and began groping and clumping his way up the unlit stairs. He heard furtive rustling and whispering from the floor above, and hoped Lizzie wasn’t in communication with dead Walter Deverell again; Gabriel had taken away her pencil planchette, but she could have improvised one with a bent fork or something.

The sitting room above him was unlit, but he could see faint changes in the dimness up there, as if figures were quickly but silently darting about.

“Who’s there?” he whispered, not wanting to wake Lizzie if it was someone else. Could Swinburne have come back here?

A draft of chilly air swept down the stairs, and Gabriel’s nostrils twitched at the scent of the sea. Christ, she had opened the French doors over the river!

Gabriel took the last steps two at a time, but the sitting room was empty when he stood panting in the dark doorway. Reflections and echoes from the river, he told himself, not intruders. He stepped to the French doors, but before pulling them closed, he looked out at the infinity of fog. A bell sounded out there somewhere, and then after a few seconds another; who would be out on the river tonight? He thought of going out onto the balcony and peering down at the dark shore below — but the sudden, irrational thought that he might see his dead father down there on the sand, blindly gaping upward, made him close the doors with enough force to rattle the glass panes.

He was sweating — because he was still wearing his overcoat. He wrestled it off and threw it, along with his scarf and gloves, onto the couch. And finally he walked across to the hall and the bedroom door.

The door was ajar, and Lizzie was asleep on the bed, lying on top of the blankets and still in the dress she’d worn at dinner. She was snoring deeply.

Gabriel sighed in qualified relief and decided to pour himself a brandy before going to bed.

Then he noticed the piece of paper on the front of her dress. Stepping closer, he saw that it was folded and pinned to the fabric.

Not letting himself think or breathe, he crossed to the bed and tore the note free and opened it.

He read: This is the only way out that will save us. Preserve my family by avoiding them, especially poor Harry.

The laudanum bottle was on the bedside table, empty now. She had always been protective of her family, especially her half-wit brother Harry.

“Lizzie!” He took hold of her bare shoulders and shook her, but her head just rolled limply. “Lizzie!” he shouted into her face.

She showed no response. He noticed that she was paler than usual, and with a trembling hand he took hold of her wrist. Her pulse, when he found it, was slow and weak.

Take the lot, he had told her when he had thrust the laudanum bottle into her hand. His chest was suddenly empty and cold.

He dropped her hand and for a long moment just stood shaking over her, his hands spread helplessly; then he cried, “I’m sorry, Guggums! Wait for me!” and hurried out of the room and down the stairs and out the street door, straight across the damp pavement of Chatham Place square to the fog-veiled lanes of Bridge Street and the house of a doctor.

CHRISTINA WAS ALREADY AWAKE when Maria came hurrying heavily up the stairs to rap at her door.

Christina had awakened at dawn, splashed her face in the water in the basin on the old birchwood washstand, and then padded barefoot across the rug — it had been the parlor rug in the house back on Charlotte Street, cut up for bedroom rugs now — and stared out through the frosted windowpanes at the bundled-up people who were already out and walking along the pavements this morning. Some were clearly peddlers, and some were probably clerks; but after a few minutes of steaming the glass with her breath, she had had to force down the suspicion that some of them were only pretending not to be scrutinizing this house, perhaps peering right up at her window from under their hat brims. She stood and looked for a while, anxiously watching for a particularly clumsy figure under a very wide hat brim.

But she had stepped back, and then heard Maria on the stairs, and she opened the door at Maria’s first knock.

Maria had pulled a robe over her nightdress, and her hair had been hastily brushed. Smells of coffee and bacon from downstairs followed her into the room.

“Lizzie,” Maria panted, “has died. I’m sorry to just — I only now heard.”

Christina sat down on the bed. “Died? Died how?”

“Laudanum — poisoning. Gabriel is ready to go mad. He had half a dozen doctors there, since midnight — Lucy Brown was at the door just now — of course it was William who spoke to her — I gather Lizzie was pronounced dead only a few minutes ago.”

Christina couldn’t see in her sister’s tear-streaked face any of the relief Christina herself felt — but if this death were a suicide, Lizzie might very well have escaped the gross, physical immortality that Christina’s uncle would force on her, and been free to take instead the spiritual immortality offered by Christ. Suicide was a deadly sin, of course, but perhaps Lizzie had done it to save herself and her unborn child from a surer exclusion from Heaven.

And Christina was honest enough to concede, though only ever to herself, that she would be jealous if Lizzie were to become one of her monstrous uncle’s vampiric brides.

“Was it,” began Christina. She paused, then went on, “Was it, does it seem to have been — an accident?”

“’Stina! Of course it was an accident. Don’t be ridiculous!” Maria sat down on the bed beside Christina. She took Christina’s hand and said, “Probably it wasn’t an accident. Oh, it might have been, you know!”

“I don’t think it would damn her soul,” said Christina, “under the circumstances?”

“True, she was saving her child, and herself — if — if she did it in time.”

Christina took a deep breath and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Listen, Moony, I know where the statue is. Papa’s little black statue.”

Maria frowned and shook her head. “What? You know where it is? How long have you—?”

“I only learned last night.”

“Oh, ’Stina, if only we had got it and destroyed it as soon as you knew! It might have saved Lizzie. But, but! — if she was too late, if she didn’t die … clean! — we can probably still save her from…”

“Premature resurrection.”

“Yes, by destroying it! With Uncle John gone, I doubt she’d be sustained. Where is it?”

“It’s — awkward. I spoke to Papa last night — his ghost, down by the river.”

“Christina, you can’t — that’s not good. That’s witchcraft.”

“It’s spiritualism, science! I didn’t … draw a pentagram, or light candles! He was just there in the shallow water, like — like some sick fish.”

“And it was cold.” Maria shook her head. “Poor Papa.” Then she squinted at her sister. “How did you happen to be down by the river last night?”

“He told me to meet him there.”

“Told you how?”

“I was — it doesn’t matter. He said—”

“You used that pencil thing that Gabriel took from Lizzie, didn’t you?”

“Somewhat. Slightly. I wasn’t trying to talk to him, but he—”

“Consulting the dead! That’s a sin, ’Stina! Who were you trying to talk to?” Then she nodded. “Uncle John.”

“Not talk to, I simply hoped to get more of the ‘Folio Q ’story. But Moony! Will you listen? The statue is apparently in Papa’s throat. When his heart failed, he put it in his mouth, hoping Uncle John might save him, and in his travail he apparently inhaled it — and choked.” Christina was horrified to realize that she was close to giggling, and she bit her tongue.

Maria’s wide face was blank. “Evidently burial in sanctified ground doesn’t stop him,” she said slowly.

“No,” agreed Christina.

“And our little ritual, at the Read estate seventeen years ago—” “It kept him away for a while. It let my body expel—” She caught herself and hurried on, “I didn’t see him for … months, afterward, and I had time to get stronger. I might have died, otherwise.”

Maria hadn’t been listening closely. “But what can we do?” she said. “We can’t dig up Papa and — and cut his throat open!”

“He said you would know how to choke him, choke Uncle John.”

“Choke him? Choke the statue? What would that mean?”

“Well, he didn’t say. Ghosts are never lucid, Moony! They’re shy — ashamed. And not very intelligent. But I think they are more honest, with their souls gone. They’ve lost all their…”

“Scruples.”

“Yes. I don’t think they remember why they ever kept secrets.”

“In his last year,” said Maria slowly, “Papa was writing a treatise on transmigration of souls. Mama burned it after he died, but he had me find and translate some Hebrew sources for him, in one of the manuscript collections in the British Museum. I could easily get permission to see those manuscripts again. There was a passage… I remember thinking at the time that it would have been helpful if I had read it before you and I did our… Grecian burial, seventeen years ago.”

“It wouldn’t … compromise you? Us, I mean? Spiritually?”

“No, as I recall, it didn’t involve summoning or confronting anything. I believe it involved mirrors — and, well, blood — but it was like a trap, or a fence; it would stop spirits, but you didn’t have to be present.”

“How would we arrange it?”

“I–I’d need to reread the old manuscript.”

Christina stood up. “When is the funeral to be? Lizzie’s, I mean.”

Maria shook her head and tried to speak; she cuffed tears from her eyes and hiccuped, then managed to say, “God knows. Apparently Gabriel is not nearly ready to admit that she has actually died.”

Christina shivered. “I hope she has. Died for good, that is to say, with no … earthly return from it.”

“I do too,” whispered Maria. “I pray to God that she has.”

Christina crossed to the pegs on which her clothes were hung. “I must go to Gabriel. And I need to get a letter to a veterinarian in Wych Street — I’ve got to cancel an appointment I made for today.”

CHAPTER TEN

SHEERNESS WAS AN old garrison town on the coast, at the mouths of the Thames and the river Medway. It was forty-six miles east of London on the London, Chatham and Dover Railway line, and Swinburne had spent two hours and nine shillings to get there in a drafty second-class railway carriage that he had shared with half a dozen women, apparently the wives of laborers in the dockyard. Swinburne had reflected that any one of the women looked capable of throwing him bodily off the train, and he had left his copy of Baudelaire’s scandalous Les Fleurs du mal in his overcoat pocket and had instead contented himself with reading Dickens’s David Copperfield. He had even pulled his ridiculous sou’wester hat down at the sides to somewhat conceal his possibly affronting hedge of coppery hair.

He was out in this Godforsaken corner of England because Lizzie had died two days earlier, apparently by her own hand.

A five-minute walk from the Sheerness station had taken him to a railed lane overlooking the shore, and since the sun had only a few minutes ago gone down over the Gravesend hills behind him, and the sky was still pale, he had stood there for a few minutes with the cold sea wind flapping the long back brim of his rubberized hat. A couple of distant figures trudged along the darkening expanse of sand below him, carrying a pole that might have been a mast or some fishing apparatus, and a man on horseback a hundred yards farther away was trotting north along the band of darker damp sand by the gray fringe of surf. Off to his right, near the empty steamboat pier, Swinburne saw a long open shed with what looked like a row of a dozen gypsy wagons in it — and then he recognized these as bathing machines stowed away for the winter. Come June they would be wheeled out, and ladies in street clothes would climb in and pull the doors closed, and then the vehicles would be drawn by horses down the slope and a few yards out into the shallows, where the ladies, having changed into bathing suits, could open the seaside doors and step down to splash about in the water, unobserved from the shore. In spite of the purpose of his quest tonight, Swinburne had forlornly wished that one hardy lady or two might have braved the cold sea this evening; and that, if any had done it, he had brought a telescope.

He had sighed and walked on to the brightly gas-lit Grand Hotel, where he had moodily drunk three brandies before strolling southeast down Broadway, away from the lights of the town. The slow crash of surf against the seawall a mile out to his right was the only punctuation to the steady wind, and the coming night looked likely to be far darker out here than any ever were in London.

Soon the lantern on the pier Chichuwee had told him to watch for stood out clearly ahead of him, and Swinburne trudged up to within a few yards of the foot of the short pier and stood there for a full minute, nerving himself to take the last few steps of this long day’s journey. Someone must have lit the lantern and hung it on its pole at the end of the pier, but Swinburne couldn’t see anyone.

He took a deep breath now and squeezed Baudelaire in his pocket for luck, then tramped down the booming planks of the pier, threading his way delicately around buckets and lengths of rusty chain.

Several moored boats rocked gently on the black water in the lantern light, but only one seemed occupied. If it were the one Chichuwee had directed him to, it was a fishing boat, and Swinburne couldn’t imagine this vessel being anything much else. The grimy, battered vessel was no pleasure craft, certainly.

The boat was about twenty-five feet long. The short mast was bare, and the sail on its tethered boom was furled, but smoke was fluttering up out of a short tin pipe on the deck forward of two wide rectangular holes; stepping closer and peering over the gunwale, Swinburne saw that the rearward hole was partly filled with what appeared to be wet gravel. Perhaps it was some unattractive sort of shellfish. The chilly onshore wind was metallic and sulfurous, with a taint of coal smoke from the little chimney.

“Are you a singer?” came a harsh voice from only a couple of yards away, making Swinburne almost dance in surprise.

A stocky gray-bearded man in a voluminous oilskin coverall was sitting against the far gunwale among untidy heaps of rope, puffing on a short clay pipe.

“No,” said Swinburne. He gestured inexpressively. “Uh, no.”

The old man waved his pipe. “On your way then. I was informed that I’m waiting for a singer.”

Swinburne bit his lip and looked up and down the miles of dark shore under the starry vault of the sky, and then at the three other boats moored here. They looked long abandoned. The wind in the ropes and the textured crash and hiss of the waves emphasized the overall silence.

“Could it,” he ventured, “have been ‘a poet’?”

For several seconds the old man squinted at him in the lantern’s light; then he nodded. “Aye, the relay bird might have meant poet just as well. Are you a poet then?”

“Yes.”

The old man’s face crinkled with something like disgust, but he got his boots under him and struggled to his feet.

“You’re going to find it a cold night,” he said. “Your hat and gloves look good enough, and I’ve got a spare pair of boots and a neck wrap, but in between will suffer.”

“Suffering will be helpful, I think,” said Swinburne, stepping aboard. “Especially in between.”

“I’m Chess,” the old man said, and as if to emphasize it, he stamped twice on the rocking deck.

“Algernon,” said Swinburne. Apparently they were not to shake hands.

The stamping had evidently been a summons, for in a few seconds two other men appeared, climbing laboriously up out of a previously unnoticed square hole in the deck near the tin chimney. Their beards were if anything whiter than Chess’s, and Chess introduced them, perhaps seriously, as his father and grandfather.

“The bait’s aboard for our catch tonight,” Chess told them, waving at the skinny, top-heavy figure of Swinburne.

The two older men had closed a hatch cover over the opening they had emerged from, and they set about casting off lines and freeing the boom and unfurling the sail. Swinburne stepped cautiously around the open pit full of wet gravel to lean against the front side of the mast and look out over the bow at the black sea.

By his shadow on the raised bow ahead of him he could see that the silent mariners had carried the lantern aboard and fixed it somewhere amidships, and then he felt the deck move as they poled the vessel away from the pier.

When the offshore wind had filled the sail and the boat had begun to tack against it, surging out across the water to the south, Chess stepped up beside Swinburne.

“You’ve brought payment,” the old man said.

Swinburne nodded and with one gloved hand dug a stoppered bottle out of his pocket.

When he had laid it in Chess’s palm, the old man held it up, squinted at it, and shook it. “Catholic?” he asked.

“As specified. From St. Ethelreda’s in Holborn.”

“Cheat me and this enterprise won’t work.”

“I know,” said Swinburne irritably, “the bird man told me that.” He waved at the bottle. “It’s genuine.”

He wondered why, if Catholic holy water was so valuable to Chess, the old man didn’t simply go ashore and fetch some on his own. Perhaps these three never did go ashore, Swinburne thought fancifully — perhaps they were a trinity that was somehow not able to.

The wind was already achingly cold on his face as he squinted past Chess at the few lighted windows on the receding Kentish hills. “How far out do you have to go?”

“You’ll tell me,” said Chess. “Quicksilver, I reckon your quarry was.”

There had been no fortuitous ave out of which Chichuwee might forcibly milk and boil Lizzie’s ghost, but Swinburne had brought him one of her handkerchiefs, and so the old bird man had used it as a “plumb line” to facilitate a session of automatic writing by means of a pencil on a felt-footed disk. Her ghost had seemed to volunteer a response, with weak squiggles that only occasionally formed words, but Chichuwee had said that if the responder was indeed Lizzie’s ghost, it was already remote — out of the river and into the sink of the sea. The only chance of meaningful contact was for Swinburne to try calling her from a boat out of sight of land.

“Yes,” Swinburne said now, shivering, “she didn’t linger.”

He didn’t tell Chess that the reason Lizzie’s ghost had not sat dormant in the river might be because her identity had powerfully repelled it by being negatively charged — even diabolically charged.

Her ghost, it seemed to Swinburne, might be her fugitive innocence.

“Out of sight of land,” he added.

Chess nodded. “They’re always that,” he said. “Why don’t you go below? You’re no use up here, and we can fetch you when we’re in the Ghost Roads.”

Swinburne eyed the little square hatch cover in the deck with distaste, but a gust of even colder wind blew tears out of his eyes and he nodded and began groping his way aft.

THE BELOWDECKS SPACE WAS only dimly illuminated by a fire visible through vents in a small cooking stove, but Swinburne could see that the height of the place was no more than four feet, from the plank floor to the plank ceiling, and about eight feet long and perhaps seven feet across at its widest point, though it narrowed to nothing up at the bow end. In this confined space, Chess and his companions had crammed a surprising amount of stuff — a railed crockery shelf, a square teakettle fitted in a square niche, bunks, and bundles of canvas and rope. Soon the inside of Swinburne’s nose had warmed enough for him to grimace at the smells of fish and sweat and tar, and he pulled out Baudelaire to have at least the mental perfume of the decadent Frenchman’s verse.

But after a few minutes of trying to recline with the book held up to a beam of orange light from the stove, Swinburne found himself sliding forward and then rolling up against one of the bunks, where he clung as the boat rolled the other way, and he guessed that they had sailed out past the barrier of the seawall. Hastily he pulled a flask from the breast pocket of his overcoat and gulped some brandy to stave off seasickness, and he anxiously watched the stove and the piles of tarred rope, ready to bolt up onto the deck if the vessel’s pitching should spill burning coals onto the rope. Regretfully he stopped trying to read Métamorphoses du vampire, shut the volume of Baudelaire, and tucked it back into his pocket.

He thought of Lizzie, and the night she had bitten him on the wrist as they had been drunkenly playing cat-and-mouse on the drawing room carpet while Gabriel had been working down the hall in his studio. Swinburne had a moment earlier presumed to call her by the pet name Gabriel used for her, Guggums, and after the answering bite she had said, in an oddly harsh voice, Call me Gogmagog. Swinburne had laughed delightedly and tried to bite her in return, but she had got up and hurried out of the room; and when he had gone looking for her, he had found her with Gabriel in the studio, and she had claimed to have been there for the last half hour.

Probably she had been! Probably the Lizzie who had bitten him was a mimicking apparition, an inhuman impostor, like the couple in Gabriel’s drawing who confronted the originals of themselves in a forest.

After perhaps half an hour, the rolling abated a bit and one of the old men lifted back the hatch cover and called down the hole, “It’s time.”

Swinburne was glad to crawl across to the hatch and stand up with his head out in the fresh air — and then he quailed and sagged, for the wind was icy and shot with spray. He ducked back into the low space and found the boots and scarf that Chess had mentioned, and when he had got them on, he took a deep breath and then crawled back to the hatch and climbed out onto the rocking wet deck.

A couple of flaring kerosene torches mounted at the bow and stern threw a white glare over the dark water, and the nearer waves glittered as they rolled past, like living, diamond-dusted obsidian.

Chess was braced up by the bow, and Swinburne staggered forward against the force of the wind to join him, both to see better ahead and to be nearer to the flame.

Chess was holding the unstoppered bottle of holy water, and Swinburne could see that half of its contents were gone.

Swinburne’s face was already numb with cold, but the chill shivered through his belly too when he looked ahead and saw … white figures standing out there over the waves in the night.

They moved bonelessly like splashes of milk in oil, and the holes that were their eyes and mouths appeared and disappeared as randomly as spots of moonlight on pavement below windblown trees; their arms waved above their shapeless heads.

And over the wind in the rigging he could hear their voices, a shaking cacophony like wind chimes. Men and women, and children, their frail cries rang away across the infinite dark face of the sea in weird atonal harmony.

Swinburne clung dizzily to the bow gunwale. Flying sea spray stung his eyes.

Then one voice out there was clear: “Hadji!” it called. “Save me with your blood!” Swinburne saw the figure now, only a dozen yards away and clearer than the rest. And even out here, even without an organic throat to propel it, the voice was one Swinburne recognized.

Chess leaned toward Swinburne. “You need to throw some of your blood into the sea,” the old man said, speaking loudly to be heard over the ghost chorus and the wind. “The bird man told you that, right?”

“No,” said Swinburne, his gloved hands gripping the slick gunwale. He shook his head.

“Well, it needn’t be gallons — just a few drops will do.” With a sharp click Chess opened a clasp knife and pressed the grip into Swinburne’s palm. “Finger’s fine. That’s your fugitive, is it?”

Tears were blowing back along Swinburne’s cheeks, mingling with the sea spray.

“No,” he said.

Hadji had been Swinburne’s childhood nickname. This was the ghost of his grandfather, who had died two years ago; Swinburne had written about him, “the two maddest things in the north country were his horse and himself”—old Sir John Swinburne had been a free-thinking follower of Voltaire who was once sent to prison for insulting the Prince Regent, and young Algernon had loved and admired him.

“Hadji!” came the cry again across the water, distinct over the wailing of the other ghosts. “Some of your living blood!”

“You have to answer,” said Chess, leaning in close to be heard, “or he’ll hang about and drown out any others.” He grinned. “Huh. Drown out.”

“It’s my grandfather,” said Swinburne, near sobbing. “I can’t bear it that he’s dead — out here.”

Chess laughed harshly. “My grandfather is dead too, and out here. At least yours doesn’t have to work a Purgatorial fishing boat.”

That made Swinburne look directly at the old man beside him, and then he hunched around to look aft at the two figures standing halfway back along the deck, black silhouettes backlit by the stern torch.

Swinburne suddenly felt cold all through, colder than the wind-borne spray. Very aware of the multitude of ghosts and the vast night sea around them, he turned back to face Chess. “Am I,” he quavered, “dead myself?”

“I think you hope to die,” said Chess, shouting into Swinburne’s ear, “but haven’t the industry to kill yourself in a straightforward fashion.” He laughed. “No, lad, you’re not dead — nor am I. But it seems we both have grandfathers wanting such care as dead men can receive.”

With his gloved right hand he pulled back the bunched left sleeves of his coverall, coat, and sweater, and then quickly tucked it all back into the glove gauntlet, but not before Swinburne had glimpsed a raw cut on the man’s wrist.

Swinburne squinted ahead at the curling wisp that was his own grandfather’s ghost. “But this isn’t them.” He pounded one fist on the gunwale. “I mean—is it?”

Chess said loudly, “They break up, when they die. The core goes away, but the shell sometimes stays. And even the shell is part of what they were.” He nodded out over the bow. “And there’s your grandfather’s.”

“No,” said Swinburne. And then he shouted, “No!” at the white figure curling in the darkness.

“What for me?” piped his grandfather’s ghost.

“Nothing from me,” said Swinburne into his clenched hands on the gunwale; he had spoken almost too quietly for even Chess to hear him over the thrashing wind, but the ghost sprang to fading mist.

Swinburne raised his head, glaring into the infinite night.

“Lizzie!” he called now. “Lizzie Siddal!”

The ghosts all just stood out there, like a million bleached banners of a long-ago defeated army.

“Lizzie!” he called again.

And another ghost came into sharper focus where his grandfather’s had been, and this one managed to look vaguely feminine in its shifting outlines.

“Algy, who are your friends?” it said, and its voice was like notes violined out of glass and sharp edges of bone.

Swinburne’s spray-stung eyes strained with the effort of getting her into focus. “Sailors,” he shouted. “Lizzie, I—”

“The dead leading the blind,” said her ghost. “Algy, it’s always cold here.”

“I’ve come to take you back,” Swinburne called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Back! How?”

Swinburne’s teeth stung as he took a deep breath. “Marry me! I love you! With Gabriel it was just ‘till death did you part,’ and that’s — done. Marry me and live in me, in this body, this warm body. ‘One flesh.’” He was still holding Chess’s opened knife, and now he stabbed his finger right through the leather glove and shook drops of blood out into the wind. “With this blood I thee wed!”

But the white figure was now smaller and less distinct. “I’m naked,” came its fainter voice. “You mustn’t look at me.”

“Clothe yourself in me! I love you! We can — travel, read, eat, drink, together!”

“I don’t have that anymore.”

“Have it all again, in me! Marry me! Here’s a ship’s captain, we can be together, a hermaphrodite—”

“No,” came her voice; then, much louder, “No.” And she was gone. The other ghosts, filling the night apparently to the invisible horizon, crowded closer, their arms waving like a moonlit kelp forest on the sea floor.

Swinburne gaped at the space where Lizzie’s ghost had been.

Chess pushed away from the bow. “Shouldn’t have spilled your blood till she agreed to take it,” he said before striding back along the rocking deck.

The old man shouted to his two dead crewmen, and they shambled to the tiller and rigging, and in moments the boat was heeling around in the wind.

Ghost limbs flailed at the taut shrouds and were whisked into vanishing fragments, and for a few tense moments as Swinburne clung to the bow their voices were a buzzing, clattering racket in his freezing ears.

“Don’t listen to them!” shouted Chess from behind him.

But Swinburne couldn’t ignore their voices, the things they were saying: “Here, where the world is quiet; / Here, where all trouble seems / Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot / In doubtful dreams of dreams…” These were lines he had written himself, and so they were convincing. “Even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea…”

He had already got one knee up on the gunwale when Chess tugged him back to sprawl painfully on the deck.

“Not your style,” Chess called to him.

Then the boat had come around and was surging northwest before the wind, and the ghost multitude quickly receded into the remote blackness.

Swinburne got wearily to his feet and gripped the rail, lowering his head and taking deep breaths of the cold sea air.

“You’ll be among ’em soon enough,” said Chess, not unkindly. “Why don’t you get in out of the wind now.”

Swinburne climbed back down to the belowdecks cabin, stunned and despairing, for he had thought his main challenge would be finding Lizzie’s ghost — it had not occurred to him that she might refuse his proposal.

WHEN THE BOAT’S PITCHING fell to a gentle rise and fall, he knew they had passed the Sheerness breakwater, and he pulled himself back up onto the deck. The kerosene torches had been extinguished, and the old lantern was again glowing on the mast.

The lights on the Kentish hills were bright yellow dots in the night. Out in the cold air again, Swinburne was shivering violently, and he had to ask Chess, who shambled up to him, to repeat something he had just said.

“It don’t work with fishing-boat captains,” the old man said more loudly.

“Wh-what doesn’t?”

“Shipboard marriages.” He shook his head. “But did you truly expect me to marry you to a ghost?”

“Oh, what d-does it matter now?”

Chess grinned, without cheer. “Just so you know in future — they couldn’t say ‘I do.’ There’s no I, and they haven’t the wherewithal to choose to do anything.”

“She chose to reject me!”

“That wasn’t a choice, lad — that was an empty gun saying click.”

“She chose to reject me,” said Swinburne again, and Chess shook his head and shambled back to rejoin his laboring dead ancestors.

After a few minutes, the mariners let the sail go slack and one of them leaned on the tiller, and Swinburne saw the pier only moments before Chess threw a line over a bollard on it and began pulling the bow in.

And the figure standing at the foot of the pier wasn’t visible until a match flared in the darkness and lit what must have been the end of a cigar.

Chess and his ancestors finished mooring the boat and tying up the lowered sail, and then Chess plodded wearily across the deck to the mast and extinguished the lantern; the darkness was total. A minute later Swinburne heard the hatch cover clatter down.

His business here seemed to be ended.

Swinburne shrugged and stepped up onto the pier.

“And how do you do, sir?” he called toward the tiny orange-glowing coal of the cigar.

“Stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” came the gruff answer.

Swinburne clenched his teeth and made himself step forward, but the cigar coal bobbed in quick retreat.

“Stay back, you fool!” came the unseen man’s voice. “Don’t you know anything? I can survive their notice, but I doubt you could.”

Swinburne forced his voice to be steady. “Whose notice?”

“Not at night, under an open sky. Noon tomorrow — in the Whispering Gallery in the dome of St. Paul’s. Stand at the southernmost point, by the stairs. Don’t fail to be there, if you hope to save your life or your soul.”

Then the cigar coal fell to the ground and went out, probably under a heel. After Swinburne had called hello a few times, he slowly but resolutely began walking forward, but his measured trudging took him all the way up to the road without hearing a sound from the man who had spoken to him; and he exhaled and relaxed and began trudging back toward Sheerness to get a room at the hotel for the remainder of the night.

ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL WAS a particularly daunting white splendor in the cold noonday sun. It stood blocking out most of the blue sky on a wide railed square at the crest of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City, and though he couldn’t see the dome from the foot of the broad marble stairs out front, the two widely separated towers and the two lofty rows of paired columns between them made Swinburne feel as insignificant as the limitless dark ocean had done last night. The bottom third of the enormous building, the hundred-foot extent from the projecting entablature between the two galleries of columns down to the pavement, seemed a slightly darker shade of white, as if the sea had once tried to engulf the cathedral and then impotently receded.

And I’m out of my depth, he thought as he began reluctantly tapping up the steps. He was wearing a hat and gloves, not because of the cold but because direct sunlight had begun lately to irritate his skin — at least this distasteful place offered welcome shade.

It was of course a church, a Christian church, and mentally he recited lines from a poem he’d written: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Certainly Swinburne didn’t seem to be conquering by pursuing the pagan sorts of supernaturalism. They were real enough — as proved by the two ghosts he had spoken to out at sea last night! — but the world had indeed grown gray, grayer than he had guessed when he had written the poem; and he was afraid that he would never be able to drink of Lethe’s river: to forget his love for Lizzie … and her refusal of him.

The broad interior of the cathedral, with its columns and the arches of its ceiling peaking impossibly far overhead, made him feel like a rodent; no service was going on at the moment, fortunately, and the isolated figures praying in the pews were all facing away from him. Who, he wondered as he scuttled through slanting beams of rainbow-colored light from the south-facing stained-glass windows, is this man who wants to talk to me? And why does he?

Far overhead, the interior of the great dome ballooned up in what must have been eight huge triangular concave panels with vague dark murals painted on them, but Swinburne slanted off to the right across the marble floor, to the stairs, before he would have to walk under its ornate high immensity; and the tall white-and-gold altar was thankfully still farther away down the long central aisle.

The corkscrew staircase was comfortably narrow and dim; it was warmer than the vast nave had been and smelled reassuringly of tallow and old book paper. He took off his hat to keep from bumping it against the low ceiling. After about a hundred ascending steps, he reached a gallery with a library at one end of it, but the Whispering Gallery proved to be higher up, so he returned to the stairs and kept climbing.

After puffing his way up an even greater number of stone stairs than before, he stepped out into the highest gallery inside the cathedral, a circular catwalk high above the nave, at the very base of the incurving dome.

A ring of tall windows in the dome above him let in bright daylight, and above them were the huge murals he had glimpsed the bottoms of from the nave floor below. He stepped out to the railing and looked down — a hundred feet directly below, the white-and-black checkerboard pattern of the floor was interrupted by a wide compass-rose mosaic.

The enormous Gothic geometry of it all, the slanting insubstantial buttresses of sunlight, and the sheer volume of empty space above and below him, were dizzying, and it was several moments before he remembered that he was supposed to meet someone right here — at the south rim of the dome, by the stairs.

He pulled out his watch and squinted at it: noon exactly. Three or four other people stood at other points around the gallery’s circumference, peering up at the murals, but none of them was paying any evident attention to him.

The view below chilled his belly, and he stepped back to lean against the rounded wall below the windows.

And at his ear came a whisper: “Poet”—he glanced around quickly, but no one was within a dozen yards of him—“stay where you are.”

Of course, he thought nervously, the Whispering Gallery! The interior of the dome must carry sounds right around the whole stone ring.

“What?” he said softly.

“Speak against the stone,” came the disembodied whisper again.

Swinburne obediently pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall.

“What do you have to tell me?” he muttered.

“You’re in love with a ghost.” The disembodied sentence seemed to carry an implicit you fool at the end of it. “You shouldn’t need me to tell you this, and if you’ve got a brain in your head you understood it last night, but — have no further contact with the thing. I’d say ‘with her,’ but — as you probably noticed — it’s not really a ‘her’ anymore. Go meet a real flesh-and-blood girl, and fall in love with her.”

Swinburne was frowning. Could this man somehow represent the Church, or the government? Was there some old law about necromancy still on the books? He peered at the other people standing at intervals around the gallery, trying to guess which of them might be the one speaking to him. “You—” he began. “This is absurd. A ghost? You’re obviously drunk—”

“One of us probably is,” came the whisper, “but it’s not me. Chichuwee told me all about your conversation with him, and I know a couple of things that the bird man doesn’t.”

Swinburne could feel his face blushing against the cold stone, and he blinked out across the dome — a beam of sunlight from one of the windows had moved onto him, and he shuffled sideways to be out of the sun’s glare. There was a tall, white-bearded old man standing on the opposite side of the railed ring, a hundred feet away across the empty air of the dome — surely that was the furtive speaker. “This is none of your—”

“It is of mine, boy,” came the eerily far-traveling whisper, and the tall old man at the northernmost point of the gallery hunched his shoulders as the voice reached Swinburne’s ears. “If it weren’t for a sin of mine, the embodiment of which was broken but now grows again behind my jugular vein — if not for that — you could go sailing out to talk to your dead girl every night; but you’re not the only one who loves her now, and your rival is inclined toward tumultuous jealousy and will surely kill you.”

“Rival? Who, Gabriel? He doesn’t—”

“No,” and this time it was spoken: “you fool. I don’t know who Gabriel is, nor who you are, and it doesn’t matter. I only know the rival. Hah! Ask Chichuwee about the Nephilim, though I expect the answer will cost you many more birds than your previous consultation did. There’s a creature, call it a goddess, an archaic goddess, who loves your ghost-girl, and who will kill any mortals who love her too, or who she loved, back when she still could. Fortunately for you, this — this goddess is wounded and blinded right now, for another day or so, and is not aware of your ill-advised expedition last night. Don’t repeat it.”

Swinburne shuffled sideways again to stay out of the sunbeam. He was trying to be amused by this grotesque conversation. “Her husband, Gabriel—he loved her, and she loved him. Is this goddess of yours going to kill him?”

“Unless he has joined a god’s family too. And I don’t need yet another member of that sort of family to deal with, so heed me. This — why are you moving?”

“Moving?”

“Along the wall.”

Swinburne shrugged. “Staying out of the sunlight. What is this family—”

“Step back into it.” The old man on the far side of the dome was clearly staring at him now. “Yes, you’ve seen me. Now humor me — step back into the sunbeam — or I’ll drag you outside without a hat.”

Swinburne was sweating, and he glanced sideways at the sunlit patch of wall.

He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’d truly rather not.”

“Bloody hell. Does it hurt, sting?”

Swinburne shrugged, then reluctantly nodded.

“And have you lately begun to … write poetry?”

“I’ve always written poetry, I—”

A hundred feet away across the dome, the old man waved impatiently. “Damn you,” came the whisper along the wall, “has it suddenly become very good? Better than you had imagined you could write?”

Swinburne’s mouth fell open. “Yes,” was all he could say.

“Step into the light. It won’t hurt your sorry hide today, trust me.”

This stranger knew so much about him that Swinburne, dazed, did as he was told: he shuffled sideways into the shaft of sunlight — and it was simply warm, not astringent.

“Well, through glass,” he muttered, mistrustful of the apparent relief, “and holy glass, at that—”

“Try it again when you’re outside. She bit you, didn’t she? Before she died?”

Swinburne rocked his head against the stone wall, feeling the mild sun on his face. “Yes.”

For a few moments there was no skating whisper along the wall, and the only sounds were the windy echoes of random footsteps and coughs from the nave below.

At last the stranger’s soft voice came again. “I had hoped your dilemma was simpler. It’s her poisonous attention on you, in you, that reacted to sunlight … but her attention right now is many times decimated and concentrated only on her wounded self. You have at least one more day, I think, before she’ll be expanded enough to have regard for you again. You must leave England within twenty-four hours. She won’t sense you on the other side of the Channel, the wide, cold salt water.”

Swinburne was looking at his own right hand in the sunlight, savoring the simple warmth of it, and for a moment he let himself imagine starting over again, in France, say, with no history, free of—

“Would I still be able to write poetry?” he asked suddenly.

“Not like you’ve been writing recently, no. Not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you’re now free to shed. But — like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably.”

Swinburne relaxed and smiled, very relieved that this decision had turned out to be so easy; and he stepped back out of the sunlight, toward the doorway to the stairs. The old man on the other side of the round gallery looked fit enough, but if he chose to give chase it was unlikely that he’d be able to catch him.

Swinburne went down the curling stairway like a dancer spinning and tapping through a very fast allegro sequence.

I will never, he thought, go near the English Channel again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FOR SIX DAYS Lizzie’s body had lain in an open coffin in the upstairs parlor at 14 Chatham Place, and though Gabriel had spent nearly every waking hour in the room with her, watching her face by candlelight because the curtains were drawn across the river-facing windows, he had been sleeping on a cot in William’s room at the Albany Street house.

Now the downstairs front door at Chatham Place was open, and the black-draped laurel wreath that had hung there for six days was taken down so that the pallbearers wouldn’t snag against it when it came time to carry the coffin out. The hearse had not arrived yet, but over the course of the last couple of hours a dozen black-clad friends and family members had solemnly stepped inside and climbed the stairs to the now-crowded sitting room. The flaring gas jets were supplemented with candles on the mantel and on two high, cleared bookshelves.

The coffin rested on a long table against the curtained windows. On a credenza against the door-side wall were several platters of sliced ham and pickles and a huge glass bowl of rum punch, and the crowd of guests was kept moving by people sidling up to the credenza to refill plates and cups. Many of the mourners took the little funeral cakes, disks of sponge cake wrapped in white paper and sealed in black wax with a skull imprint, but these they mostly pocketed as remembrances.

Christina, wearing one of the black bombazine dresses she’d worn for a year after her father’s death, was sitting beside Maria on the sofa that faced the coffin and the curtained windows, and both of them were watching Gabriel warily. He was standing behind the coffin; Swinburne stood beside him, nervously fingering his gingery mustache, but Gabriel only stared down at Lizzie’s smooth white face.

He had been incredulous a week ago when his sisters had told him where Christina believed the diabolical little statue was located, and then for several hours he had adamantly opposed the plan Maria had devised from new study in the Reading Room at the British Museum — but he had finally relented, and he had even helped his sisters cut out the mattress and lining of the coffin in order to attach to the wooden floor the hammock-like array of etched and stained downward-facing mirrors.

Christina was relieved now to see that the white cambric mattress and silk linings showed no signs of their tampering, at least with Lizzie’s pale and oddly undeteriorated body now occupying the coffin. The veil Maria had constructed lay beside Lizzie’s head, with a few locks of her red hair draped over it to keep any mourners from getting too close a look at it.

“WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT calls ‘unclean spirits,’” Maria had explained to Gabriel and Christina six nights ago, “the old Jewish mystics called dybbuks, though originally the word was more a verb than a noun. The identity of one of these spirits is not confined to its body but is a standing spherical pattern of radiation, like Faraday’s description of electric fields.”

Christina had needed to have that explained to her, though Gabriel had claimed to know all about it.

Maria had gone on, “It’s a pattern that fills space, and matter is only a — like a cloud, to it. A mirror can cripple one of these spirits by reflecting part of its wave-form back on itself, so that the waves interfere with each other — they break the coherent patterns of its identity, causing arbitrary patches of awareness and oblivion, clear sight and blindness, presence and absence.”

“But,” Gabriel had objected, “if matter is just a cloud to them, why should a mirror be distinct?”

“It’s distinct if their attention is called to fix on it,” Maria had told him. “If one of these spirits incorporates a mirror into its particular attention, the reflection occurs. To be sure Uncle John fixes on the mirrors we use, they must be etched, and the incised grooves filled with blood that he recognizes and — and desires — and that he therefore will focus on.”

Gabriel had been drinking brandy and pacing around the table in his studio, to which Lizzie’s body had been carried. Delivery of the coffin had been promised for the next day.

“Where do we place this mirror—”

“Array of mirrors,” said Maria, “for maximum diffraction.”

“—This array of mirrors?”

“Gabriel, we must place it directly over the statue, which is the kernel of Uncle John’s identity; and that’s in Papa’s throat, in his coffin. We must line the bottom of poor Lizzie’s coffin with these mirrors, facing downward, and then she must be buried directly on top of Papa.”

To Christina’s surprise, Gabriel had not objected to this. He had nodded moodily and said, “It would be a real acknowledgment, finally, that she is — was — a member of our family.”

Both Christina and Maria had stirred, but neither of them spoke; it was true that the rest of the Rossetti family had not ever warmed to Gabriel’s melancholy bride.

Without discussing it, all three of them had known that the blood in the mirror grooves must be Christina’s. And both sisters had insisted, over Gabriel’s initial protests, that smaller etched and inward-facing mirrors must be sewn onto Lizzie’s veil too, just in case poor Lizzie had after all not managed to escape the Nephilim’s domination.

The blood on Lizzie’s mirrors, they all finally agreed, must be Gabriel’s.

THE SMELLS OF HAM and pickle and candle wax in the stuffy, crowded room were beginning to nauseate Christina, and she stood up, intending to go downstairs and stand in the street for a few minutes, when she saw Gabriel straighten from beside the coffin and frown at something behind her.

She turned to scan the crowd, and a moment later she gasped when she saw Adelaide and her veterinarian companion sidling over to the trays of food.

Christina stepped up beside Gabriel and whispered, “You and I both made them part of our family.” He started around the coffin toward the uninvited newcomers, but Christina closed her hand around his black crepe armband. “And because of you and me, their daughter is menaced by what took Lizzie.”

Gabriel exhaled and gave her a smoldering glance, then nodded.

Swinburne was leaning in dizzily behind Gabriel’s shoulder.

“Who are they?” he asked. Christina exhaled through her nose to repel the fumes of rum on Swinburne’s breath. “I must say,” Swinburne went on, “women look fetching when they’re in mourning.”

“Oh, never mind, Algy,” snapped Gabriel. “They’re not important.” He stared into the coffin again. “Nobody is, anymore.”

Swinburne frowned thoughtfully and stepped back, though his eyes followed Christina.

She turned toward the door, consciously put on a smile that should appear at once sad, surprised, and welcoming; and when she felt she’d got it right, she began threading her way through the guests toward Adelaide and Mr. Crawford.

“WE’RE FRIENDS OF MISS Christina,” said Crawford for the third time in two minutes. “No, we didn’t know Mrs. Rossetti.” He was sweating in his black frock coat.

McKee had read about Lizzie Rossetti’s death and impending funeral and had insisted that the two of them attend; Crawford had reluctantly agreed when she promised that this would be their last visit to Highgate Cemetery.

They had made visits to the cemetery on four of the last six days — McKee had gone alone on the days when Crawford’s practice took precedence — and twice they had even climbed the wall, separately, to search the grounds by night; and they had not caught one glimpse of anyone who might have been their daughter, Johanna.

Crawford now looked at McKee, who had her arm linked through his to prevent them being separated in the press of mourners, and he reflected that she looked a good deal more tired and discouraged than she had when she had come to his surgery at dawn eight days ago, even though at that time she had believed Johanna was dead.

He supposed he looked tired too — he’d been staying up late to do accounts that ordinarily would be done in the afternoons. It would be good for both of them when this last cemetery excursion was done, and the two of them would be able to go their separate ways — though probably McKee would spend the rest of her life monitoring the marble-studded lawns at Highgate Cemetery.

Just this funeral to get through, he thought — and then he realized that many of the starkly gas-lit faces he could see around him also seemed to reflect an imperfectly concealed relief. Apparently Gabriel’s friends believed the marriage had been in some ways an ill-advised one.

Through a gap in the milling mourners he caught a momentary glimpse of Lizzie Rossetti’s still profile in the coffin, and though she looked nothing like Adelaide McKee, she brought his thoughts back to McKee; one day McKee too would be dead. Though it was obviously true, the thought troubled him with something like a premonition of guilt. Crawford and McKee had not talked very much during the past week’s expeditions, but they had quickly established an unconsidered partnership, seldom having to discuss who paid for cabs or coffee or spoke first to a cemetery guard or policeman, always understanding from a nod or frown or gesture what was proposed to be done next.

His thought about Gabriel was echoing in his head — an ill-advised marriage.

And across the room he now saw the piping-voiced little bald gentleman they had met at Christina Rossetti’s house last Monday — Crawley or something, his name was.

McKee had noticed him too. “Christina’s suitor, Cayley,” she whispered, “who disapproves of her work with the lower orders.”

Crawford nodded, remembering. Cayley seemed to be registering disapproval today too, blinking across at one of the guests whose coppery red hair could admittedly use cutting, or at least brushing.

From the stairs beyond the doorway at his back Crawford heard someone say, “The hearse is here.” The phrase was repeated in muted tones through the crowded room, and people began bolting the remaining punch in their cups and crouching to set plates down against the walls.

“Pigs,” whispered McKee, and Crawford shook her arm reprovingly.

“Well, they are,” she whispered.

“Artists,” he said quietly. “Poets.” He picked up one of the paper-wrapped funeral cakes from the tray by the door, blinked at the skull imprint in the black sealing wax, and tucked the thing into his pocket.

An old man moved aside from in front of them, and Crawford found himself looking straight into Christina Rossetti’s wide brown eyes. Her face looked both paler and younger by the gaslight, framed by her pulled-back brown hair and the high black neckline of her dress.

“Adelaide!” she said softly. “Mr. Crawford! It was good of both of you to come. I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t able to — Gabriel and I weren’t able to go with you, last week.” She looked at McKee. “And I’m very sorry to perceive that you haven’t found good news.” She glanced back toward Maria and Gabriel, and then whispered, “But we hope to end, today, the peril that we discussed at the zoo.”

“End it?” said McKee. “How?”

The little Cayley fellow had sidled closer and appeared to be trying to hear.

“I—” said Christina, “I’ll tell you after it has been implemented. The arrow is in flight, there’s nothing to be done but wait — for an hour or two.”

The people around them were shuffling toward the door, rocking from side to side the way people always did at solemn events, and Christina took McKee’s elbow in her left hand and Crawford’s in her right and led them forward.

“You came by cab?” she said. “I’m to be in the coach ahead of the hearse, but I’ll get you places in one of the mourning coaches.”

MARIA WAS STANDING BESIDE Gabriel now.

“It’s time to close the coffin,” she told him softly, and she leaned in and pushed Lizzie’s hair aside to lift the veil, which was heavy with the little inward-facing mirrors she had sewn onto the inner side of the lace. She carefully draped it over Lizzie’s calm face, making sure that it was even and wouldn’t be dislodged, and turned away with tears in her eyes.

Swinburne and William had taken hold of the coffin lid and had begun to swing it up, but Gabriel stopped them with a raised hand.

“I–I need to leave something of myself with her,” he said. His voice was unsteady. “Wait a moment.”

He blundered through the mourners and hurried down the hall to the bedroom, and very shortly he had returned carrying a battered octavo-sized notebook.

“All my poems,” Gabriel said hoarsely. “I send them with her.” He laid the notebook on Lizzie’s cold crossed hands and then bent over and rested his head on it.

Swinburne opened his mouth and closed it, blinking at the notebook in the coffin, and then said, “No, Gabriel, that’s just rude — she wouldn’t want you to sacrifice your poetry.”

William had been frowning, but now he said, “It’s for you to decide, Gabriel.”

Gabriel’s face was expressionless, but tears were coursing down his cheeks into his goatee. “My poetry henceforth is for her alone. Close it.”

Swinburne exhaled and spread his hands, but he and William nodded and solemnly closed the coffin.

THE HEARSE IN THE street out front was a black carriage with glass sides, and black ostrich feathers waved above the gold trim along the edges of the polished roof. The gold was dull under the gray morning sky. Four black horses were harnessed to it, blowing steam from their nostrils, and in addition to the coachman there were half a dozen attendants and two traditional “mutes,” all of them apparently provided by the undertaker and all wearing black silk hatbands and gloves; Crawford reflected that the funeral must have cost Gabriel a fair packet.

The four mourning coaches were designated by black velvet cloths roped over their roofs, and blankets of the same material on the pairs of horses.

Christina led Crawford and McKee down the pavement to the last of the four mourning coaches, behind which stood several cabs and carriages. Christina glanced back, but none of the attendants had followed them, and so with an impatient sigh, she herself stepped up to take hold of the silver handle and pull the door open.

She hopped back down, and, before turning away and returning to her family, she said, breathlessly, “Today I think we will free the world of my uncle.”

Crawford and McKee exchanged a wide-eyed glance, and then he helped her up into the coach and followed her in and took the rearward-facing seat.

He took his hat from the seat beside him and set it on his lap when another couple climbed in, and again he had to explain that he and McKee were friends of Christina’s but had never met the deceased. The newcomers shook their heads, probably wondering why such comparative strangers should merit seats in one of the mourning coaches, but contented themselves with frowning and staring out the windows. McKee caught Crawford’s eye and bobbed one eyebrow.

From where he sat, Crawford couldn’t see the pallbearers carry out the coffin and slide it into the hearse, but the line of vehicles eventually began moving and traced a long rattling curve out of the Chatham Place square and proceeded north between the stately old office buildings along Bridge Street.

The procession rolled along at a steady pace onward up Farrington Road, for many of the wagons and omnibuses and cabs gave right of way to the line of black-draped vehicles; and in less than an hour they had crossed the North London Road and were among country roads bordered by leafless trees, and the funeral carriages spread farther apart as the horses were urged into a fast trot. At bends in the road, Crawford could see the attendants who had been walking alongside the hearse now perched on top of it, clutching their hats among the fluttering black ostrich feathers.

The procession slowed and closed up again as the horses pulled the carriages up Highgate Hill, and when the road leveled out, the yard in front of the Highgate Cemetery arches was close by on the right.

McKee and Crawford let the other couple disembark first, and when they had followed them down the coach step and onto the packed sand, McKee led Crawford away from the press of carriages and horses and mourners rearranging their coats and hats.

“Christina aims to do something consequential, here, today,” McKee said. “You ever have any dealings with pickpockets?”

Crawford shook his head, looking around at the brick tower and the gates and the lawns beyond, which had become disappointingly familiar sights to him over the past week.

“Well,” said McKee, “if your attention is being called to one place, you’re often well advised to look in all other directions instead.”

Gabriel and five other men were carrying the coffin in through the gates, and Crawford took McKee’s arm and started forward across the crowded yard. Under the overcast sky, nobody cast any shadows.

THE CEMETERY CHAPEL WAS drafty, and the gray daylight muted the colors of the tall stained-glass windows. The men among the mourners had removed their hats, but everyone kept their coats. The walls were dark stone, and the ceiling was lost in the shadows of massive crossbeams.

The coffin, draped in a white cloth now, rested on a platform at the front of the central aisle, and Crawford could see the backs of Gabriel’s and Christina’s heads up in the front pew, along with others who were probably relatives.

The priest standing in front of the shadowed altar had been speaking for several minutes without Crawford being able to make out his words, but now he said more loudly, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord, ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”

“Bad news for that Lizzie girl,” whispered McKee.

“He means ‘believeth in God,’” Crawford whispered back, “not — their uncle.”

“I hope she caught that distinction.”

Crawford nudged her to be quiet, for the priest had stepped down from the railed-off altar and around the coffin and begun walking slowly toward the doors, and Gabriel and the five other pallbearers — one of whom, Crawford noticed, was the fellow with coppery red hair sticking out in all directions — had stood up and taken hold of the coffin handles and begun shuffling down the aisle behind him.

The family members in the front pew stepped out one by one and filed along after it, their footsteps on the stone floor echoing in the arches of the high ceiling, but Christina Rossetti stepped out of the line and into the pew where Crawford and McKee stood.

She had bumped Crawford so that he would make room for her in the pew, and now gave him an awkward smile. He noticed that in spite of the chilly draft, her forehead was misted with perspiration.

“Distract me,” she whispered.

An old woman who might have been Christina’s mother gave her a wondering frown, but kept moving after the coffin toward the doors.

Crawford nodded. “Uh, puree of veal is the best remedy for general cat malaise,” he told Christina quietly. “Chicken or beef, though the cats might relish them, are of no avail.”

McKee had heard Christina’s whisper and reached into her bag and lifted out three of the little paper-wrapped funeral cakes and began juggling them — to the evident surprised irritation of the few mourners who were still filing past the pew.

Crawford, his face reddening, grabbed her arm to stop her making a spectacle of herself, and though McKee managed to catch one of the cakes and Crawford snatched uselessly at another, two fell down under the padded kneeler at their feet.

Crawford and McKee both bent to retrieve them and knocked their heads together; McKee’s bonnet fell down over her face and she sat down, whispering curses as she shoved it back into place.

Crawford sat down too. He had managed to pick up one of the cakes, and he scowled at it while he rubbed his forehead. The wax seal had cracked, and the imprinted skull was split — the smaller piece came off in his palm.

“Here’s Death’s jawbone,” he told Christina, and the ringing in his ears made him speak more loudly than he meant to.

Someone lagging behind the tail end of the mourners’ procession was suddenly leaning over him.

“To whom are you referring, sir?” came a harsh whisper.

Crawford blinked up at the speaker and was not very surprised to recognize Trelawny. The old man had hung back from the rest of the crowd and seemed to be more observer than mourner.

Crawford mutely held out the fragment of black wax. “This,” he croaked.

“Ah!” said Trelawny scornfully. “You clowns again! Diamonds, you do yourself no service associating with these idiots.”

Christina’s lips were pressed together, and she nodded solemnly. “But, Samson, can you juggle?” she asked him, crouching to retrieve the third cake and taking the others from McKee and Crawford and holding them all out toward Trelawny.

The old man looked past Christina’s shoulder, and apparently saw that the funeral party had all exited the chapel; and then he tossed one of the cakes in the air and followed it with the other two, and in a moment he had all three whirling in a crisscross pattern in front of his face.

When he had done it for enough seconds to demonstrate that he could, he let one hand drop to his side, caught all three cakes in the other, and handed them back to Christina.

“Anybody can do three,” he said. “I can do five.”

Christina stepped past him into the aisle. “Will you all be so kind as to accompany me to the committal?” She was smiling, but her face was pale. “You are all wonderfully diverting.”

Trelawny scowled and rocked on his heels for a moment, then shrugged and took her arm and started for the rear of the chapel. He sniffed the air. “It’s you he’s paying such intense attention to, isn’t it?”

Crawford and McKee shuffled along behind them, listening.

“Yes,” said Christina in a strained voice. “It was this way at my father’s funeral too — I should have known it would happen again, when I’m — once more within a stone’s throw of where the statue which is his core is buried.”

“A stone’s throw,” said Trelawny hollowly, shaking his white-maned head. “And you know where it’s buried? I’ve been here several times, during this past week.” He jerked a thumb back at McKee and Crawford. “Saw Rahab and Medicus here once, though I made sure they didn’t see me.”

“But I can ignore his … wordless song,” Christina went on, “while I have you three to tell me things like … what cures cat malaise.”

“Veal,” said Trelawny firmly.

“Just as I said,” put in Crawford.

The gray daylight outside seemed bright after the dimness of the chapel, but the air was colder, and Crawford shivered and squinted after the funeral procession. The line of mourners had crossed a gravel-paved yard and was mounting a short stone stairway between high walls with tall green cypress trees beyond.

Christina hurried after them, her boots crunching in the windy silence, and Trelawny and Crawford and McKee lengthened their strides to catch up.

At the top of the steps the funeral party was shuffling and bobbing down a lane between trees and patchy lawns to the left, and Christina stepped after them — but McKee halted and caught Crawford’s upper arm in a tight grip.

He glanced at her and noticed her wide-eyed stare — she was looking to the right, away from the funeral procession, and he nervously followed her gaze.

There was a small figure standing in deep shadow between a vine-draped oak and a marble monument with a stone dog on it.

It appeared to be a thin little girl standing there, and Crawford felt his scalp tighten and the backs of his hands tingle before he consciously realized who it might be.

McKee had released Crawford’s arm and was hurrying across the gravel path toward the shadowy figure; Crawford looked back — Trelawny had paused, and met Crawford’s eye and waved him on impatiently before turning away and following Christina.

Crawford ran after McKee and skidded to a halt when she paused on the verge of the grass.

“Johanna?” called McKee hoarsely, half extending her hands.

It was indeed a girl, Crawford could see now, and she stepped back out of the shadows into the gray daylight — she wore a long-sleeved black shift but her feet were just wrapped in bundled rags; the limp brim of a floppy hat framed and shadowed her face, and her hair was a weedy tangle over enormous dark eyes.

“I’m — your mother,” said McKee, her voice breaking.

Crawford took a breath. “And I’m your father,” he said.

“We want to take you home,” McKee said.

The girl blinked at them in evident confusion, and then she spun and began sprinting away across the hilly grass between the tall tombstones.

McKee hiked up her skirt and went running after her, and Crawford was right behind her.

The girl was shorter than many of the monuments along the lane, and while McKee ran straight after her, Crawford slanted out to the right and ran along the path, hoping to see the girl as she darted between the tall gray tombs and obelisks.

He was sure he was running faster than she was, but after a dozen paces he let himself clop and scuff to a halt.

“She disappeared,” he called to McKee, who was running more slowly on the damp grass.

McKee shook her head and kept running. When she had got even with Crawford, though, she stopped, panting and almost sobbing.

“She’s close by,” she gasped. “We must search among the graves.”

What do we do if we catch her? wondered Crawford; but he nodded and began striding through the grass between the gravestones.

He quickly saw that there were only a few corners in the immediate area where even a very small person could hide, and within a minute he and McKee had walked around all the nearby blocks and columns of marble, and peered up into the bare tree branches, and were standing face-to-face.

“She’s alive,” panted McKee. “She can’t have vanished.”

Crawford remembered the way the doglike creature that Trelawny had called Miss B. had disappeared in Regent’s Park last Tuesday, and he strode around the nearby stones peering more carefully at the damp grass; and at the foot of a chest-high granite tomb set against a low hill he noticed a patch of newly flattened grass blades.

He walked over to look at it more closely. The crushed area, he saw, extended right to the wall of the tomb — and some grass blades appeared to be lying under it.

The tomb wall was divided into nine coffered squares, each about a foot and a half across, and the streak of flattened grass was centered on the middle square of the bottom row.

He crouched beside it. “I think,” he began, and he pushed at the stone square. It slid inward.

McKee was beside him then, and she pushed it in as far as she could without lying down; and then she pulled her hat off and lay down prone on the damp grass and pushed the block inward until her shoulder was against the stone wall of the tomb. When she pulled her arm out, she was holding the hat the child had been wearing.

“I can fit through here,” McKee said, and she stretched her arms through the hole and began to pull herself forward.

“I should go first!” exclaimed Crawford, but already McKee’s shoulders had disappeared inside the tomb; and the toes of her boots were tearing at the grass to push her farther in; and he bared his teeth and snapped his fingers impatiently until her boots disappeared into the narrow square of darkness.

And then he had tossed his hat and coat aside and was crouching to lie flat on the grass himself, and sliding his hands forward into the hole.

As the top of his head scraped under the low second-row square, he tried to spread his arms. To his left there was some empty space, and he could feel the block they had pushed inward, but to his right and above him the passageway was no wider than the hole he’d crawled in through; and when he had slithered in a yard farther, his groping hands discovered that the open space on the left closed up too. He was glad that he had left his coat behind; even so, his shirt was scraping the stone walls on both sides, and he had to keep his right shoulder lifted a bit so that his rib cage was diagonal in the square tunnel, since there was no room for him to lie flat. Very quickly he had left behind the gray daylight.

He could hear McKee pushing herself along ahead of him, and from beyond her puffed a cold, clay-scented draft.

He could feel that his feet were inside now. The surface under him felt like dirt-gritty stone, and then it was just flat stone, textured with what felt like chisel grooves.

Crawford was panting, and the noise of it was batted back at him by the very close stone surfaces, and it occurred to him that he could not touch his face: even if he raised his arm to the top of the square tunnel and ground his elbow into the corner, there wasn’t room for him to swing his forearm backward.

Instantly the breath stopped in his throat and his palms slapped the floor and began pushing him backward while he tried to tug himself along with the skidding toes of his boots. His shirt was snagging against the walls and bunching up around his neck.

Then he was breathing again, in rapid gasps, but over the noise of that and his thunderous heartbeat he heard McKee call softly from the darkness ahead, “Crawford, what is it?”

And he could hear in her voice the tightness of nearly unbearable strain, of savage panic savagely suppressed.

Clearly she was experiencing everything that he was, and she was not clawing her way back out. She was ahead of him in this tunnel, and that was horrible, but all he could do about it was to be there too, with her.

He forced himself to exhale all the air from his lungs; then he flexed his invisible fingers and inhaled. He realized that his crumpled shirt was sodden with sweat.

“Nothing,” he said. “I — thought I felt a spider.”

After a moment he heard her cough out two tense syllables of a laugh. And then she was moving again, and he resumed pulling himself along after her, suppressing all thoughts.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A DOZEN OF THE mourners had come all the way to the grave in the familiar clearing among the elm trees, which Christina thought had grown taller since her father’s funeral here eight years ago. She took a step closer to the deep rectangular hole cut in the grassy sod and looked across it at the faces — there was Gabriel, his face a sagging blankness, and William, and Maria with a handkerchief to her eyes, and their mother and aunt, and twitchy Swinburne who had not removed his hat, and the priest — and that white-bearded man was Edward Trelawny! — and, hanging back with their caps in their hands, the four gravediggers — but where had Adelaide and Mr. Crawford got to?

She looked down into the hole, but she wasn’t standing close enough to see the top of her father’s coffin, if indeed it was now exposed; but perhaps the gravediggers had left a layer of soil to lie between her father’s coffin and this new one.

She had asked one of them about the condition of her father’s grave before they had dug the fresh hole, and she had been disturbed to hear the man’s offhand remark that there had been a mole hole in the grass over it, and that their shovels had ruptured segments of the hole all the way down.

But there was no way Christina could ask them to clear all the dirt away from her father’s coffin to see if there was a hole in it.

The pile of earth they had dug out — for the second time in eight years — was a mound under a green tarpaulin off to her left, though a token shovelful of dark loam had been left on the brown grass beside the grave.

The priest was shaking holy water onto Lizzie’s coffin now, the drops beading up on the varnished lid like raindrops, and he was reading something from the Bible in a frail voice that the breeze snatched away.

Lizzie’s coffin lay now on a black-velvet-draped bier on the grass to the right of the group of mourners. It would have cost Gabriel quite a bit — not just the two-inch-thick polished oak and the brass handles and plaque, but, as William had whispered to her, the sacrificial offering inside it of all of Gabriel’s poems!

Christina reflected with a shiver that she could never sacrifice her own poetry that way. It would be like burning an old lover’s letters — destroying something that was not entirely hers to dispose of.

The thought of her poetry brought on another dizzy, fiddling wave of her uncle’s attention, so strong that she almost expected to see him among the mourners, staring intently at her with the eyes of the portrait on the wall at home; but she knew he was down in that hole, inside her father’s coffin, in fact inside her father’s dead throat.

If only the damned priest could hurry, and at last … at last let the gravediggers fill in the hole, she thought quickly, steering her mind away from a thought she must not let her uncle perceive.

She frowned and shut her eyes and tried to pray, though she was even more afraid of God’s attention than of John Polidori’s.

EVENTUALLY, “A WELL,” CAME McKee’s voice from the darkness ahead. “I think.”

Crawford kept crawling forward until his fingertips brushed the soles of her boots in the pitch blackness.

“Don’t crowd me,” she said. “I can feel rungs down in it, like the one by St. Clement’s. Damn, I should have come in feet first.”

She was hesitating, and Crawford almost said, Let me go first, before he realized how useless that thought was; then she said softly, perhaps speaking to herself, “I think we’re closest to St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. ‘I do not know, says the great bell at Bow.’” Then, louder, she said, “Aedis te deum nosco.”

Her boots moved forward, out of reach, and he heard the fabric of her dress sliding against stone.

“What are you going to do?” Crawford asked hoarsely.

“I’m going to grab hold of one of the rungs below me, and then — do a somersault, I suppose, and try to hang on through it.”

Crawford tried to picture what she was describing, and he couldn’t see how she could maintain her grip through such a move.

“Are there,” he asked desperately, “rungs above you?”

“Good thought.”

He heard her dress rustling and tearing, and her shoes knocked and scuffed in front of his face. He reached out and lightly touched the soles of them, and he realized that she had managed to roll over onto her back in the tight tunnel.

She shifted farther ahead, and then exclaimed, “Yes! Solid! Thank God one of us is thinking — I believe I would have killed myself going down headfirst.”

Crawford nodded in agreement, though there was no way she could see it. Sweat rolled down into his eyes.

He heard her shift forward in stages, and then it was just her heels skidding on stone and he heard her panting outside the narrow tunnel; after a few moments he heard her boots clunking on iron — they ascended a few rungs, and then descended, echoing in some bigger space.

“I’m below you now,” came her voice. “Roll over and slide out.”

Crawford was bigger around than she was, but he managed to get onto his side and push his way forward until his head and arms were projecting out of the tunnel, though there was still no light at all.

The wet-clay draft was now palpably coming from below him, chilling his wet shirt, and the noise of his breathing echoed away in a big volume of air. He could hear McKee’s boots scraping on metal some yards below him, and beyond that he now heard a low, many-toned humming — and he remembered McKee’s description of the vox cloacarum, the sound caused by pressure differences in the infinite old sewers. This seemed different.

He groped upward with one hand and found a metal rod — he tugged it, and it didn’t give, so he pulled himself farther out and was able to roll more and get his other hand on it too.

He pulled himself farther out into the black abyss and had to push with his heels to get his shins out past the top edge of the tunnel, but at last he was able to set his feet on the bottom edge of it, and then up onto the rungs.

Then he was following McKee in her audibly slow descent, past the tunnel mouth and farther down into the well.

After climbing down a few more rungs, he said, “That wasn’t ‘oranges and lemons.’”

“It was Latin for ‘I know thee as the god of the temple,’” she said. “Now hush.”

Crawford was too sore and tired to do more than twitch at the first touch of the insect wings, and after the surprise of the first flutter at his cheek, he ignored their feather touches on his face and hands. The work of moving one hand and one foot, and then the other hand and the other foot, and the rhythmic chuff of his breath against the stone wall in front of his ever-flexing knuckles, became nearly automatic, and he tried to imagine the long-lost people who must have built this well. Into his mind swam images of Roman soldiers battling men who fought naked with crude black-iron swords.

“Again there’s a drop,” came McKee’s voice from below him, jarring him out of the insistent daydreams. “I can’t see a thing below, but — Johanna did it, so we can.”

Crawford’s first thought was that if he heard McKee fall a long way he could climb up the ladder and make his way back through the tunnel to the open air — but he couldn’t permit that.

“I’ve,” he said, “got a new watch. Let me drop it and we can listen and see how long it takes to hit something.”

“A capital notion, my dear,” she said, and he heard a shiver of exhaustion and relief in her voice. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and fumbled one-handed at the little bar on the end of the chain; it was tucked through a waistcoat buttonhole, and when he finally poked it free, he lost his grip on the watch.

“There it goes,” he said hastily.

He waited several seconds, but heard nothing.

His belly was suddenly icy and tingling at the thought of a vast drop below them, and he gripped the rung he was holding on to tightly and tried to flatten himself against the wall.

“Climb … back … up,” he said distinctly through clenched teeth.

McKee’s quavering voice said, “But — she must have come this way—”

And then another voice, a little girl’s, spoke hesitantly from not far below them: “I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.”

Crawford didn’t like the sound of must fall, but he said to McKee, “I’ll climb down and drop as soon as I hear you land and step aside.”

THE FOUR BURLY GRAVEDIGGERS in their rough corduroy trousers and jackets had slung a pair of ropes under the gleaming black coffin, and now they came forward out of the tree shadows and lifted it off the bier and plodded across the grass toward Christina, with the coffin swinging between them. She stepped back hastily, and two of them moved to each side of the grave and then began lowering the coffin into the hole.

The mourners shuffled closer, with the white-haired old priest leading the way; Christina wondered what the old cleric would do if he knew what was in the grave. And Gabriel looked ready, Christina thought with sudden agonized sympathy, to jump into the grave himself. And this is all my fault, she thought; and Papa’s too, and Papa’s too, for bringing the hellish thing back from Italy and then giving it to me.

The ropes went slack, and two of the gravediggers rapidly drew them up and coiled them, and then all four stepped back.

Christina’s face went icy cold — for her uncle’s attention was still a quivering shadow on her mind; desperately she steered her thoughts toward her father’s old headstone and away from the panicky realization that her uncle’s identity was not fragmented now that Lizzie’s doctored coffin sat on top of her father’s.

The priest shook more holy water down into the grave and said, “‘We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.’”

Christina made the sign of the cross, though she wasn’t Catholic. He is paying such exclusive attention to me, she thought, because I’m still physically close to his petrified body. The terrible attention will wane as I drive away.

And she knew that Polidori had caught that thought and ruefully agreed with it; though his intrusive identity seemed to promise a more lasting intimacy someday soon.

Gabriel stepped forward and crouched beside the shovelful of dirt beside the grave, and he picked up a handful and scattered it gently into the grave.

CRAWFORD HAD HEARD MCKEE splash into mud when she dropped from the last rung, and so he was not surprised when his boots plunged into viscous muck; and he had landed with bent knees and managed to stay upright.

The humming he had heard earlier was louder now and sounded even less organic.

“Johanna!” called McKee. “Where are you?”

Crawford jumped as a chorus of harsh voices, all speaking in unison, echoed in reply, “She is here with me. Come in.” The voices seemed to reverberate from another chamber than the space in which Crawford and McKee stood.

Crawford didn’t move now, and from the silence that followed the echoes of the voices, he knew McKee didn’t either; then he heard a rustle of clothing and a faint metallic scrape, and his nostrils caught the pungent smell of garlic. Hastily he dug his own little bottle out of his waistcoat pocket, though he didn’t unscrew its lid yet.

He heard her step forward in the mud to his left, in the direction the voices had seemed to come from; and, though his face was icy with sweat and his knees were shaking so badly that he feared he might fall down, Crawford made himself lift one foot and swing it ahead and then put it down in the unseen mud and set his weight on it, and then lift the other. His free hand was extended out in front of himself, and when he heard McKee slap some surface, he found no obstacle, though through his boot toe he felt a rounded shelf to step up onto.

Her whisper came to him from a yard away to his left: “A sort of bent pillar, here.”

“An opening here,” he muttered. “And a step.”

Her hand touched his shoulder, then slid down to his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for staying,” she whispered. “You are — Oh, hell. Thank you.”

He could think of no answer, and only squeezed her hand in the moment before she drew it away.

With his boot he could feel the edge of a hole in the curved surface of the step, and, carefully sliding his leading foot around it to move ahead, Crawford felt a close concave wall in front of him with an opening in it; he reached up and down to trace the shape of the opening — it was tall and narrow, and the top third curved to the right so that he would have to go through sideways, leaning forward. Whatever this structure was, it appeared to have no straight lines or corners.

“Hole in the floor,” he told McKee softly. “Opening in the wall directly ahead.”

He could still see nothing, but he strongly sensed sentient presences on the far side of the curved slit in the stone wall.

He managed to whisper, “I’m stepping through.”

There was no reply beyond her fast breathing, so he gritted his teeth and slid through the narrow, bent gap and found himself standing on a smooth, slanted floor. The air was warmer on this side of the partition, and smelled of incense and machine oil.

McKee scraped through behind him, and her shoulder bumped his.

At that moment, glaringly bright yellow flames sprang up overhead all around them — Crawford yelled in surprise and leaped back, throwing one arm across his eyes, but the slick floor sloped up steeply behind him; his heels skidded and he found himself sitting down and sliding forward to where he’d been standing a moment before.

He stood up again, slowly, holding his arms out for balance. McKee had dropped to a tense crouch. Blinking and squinting, he could now see that they were in the narrower end of a large, roughly egg-shaped chamber, as if they had entered a barn-sized bubble in solid tan marble; torches blazed at intervals high up on the incurving walls.

A dozen vaguely man-shaped figures that seemed to be made of shifting mud swayed on a lower level in the middle of the chamber — the humming seemed to emanate from irregular sputtering holes in the fronts of their heads — but Crawford’s attention was helplessly fixed on the man who stood on a wide rise beyond them. They were of human height, but the man towered above them, and Crawford’s first impression was that the man was very far away, miles away, and stood as high as a mountain.

Then Crawford saw that the man held in his arms the little girl they had seen running away among the gravestones, and this restored the perspective — the man and the girl were no more than forty feet away — though Crawford’s eyes ached with the effort of trying to keep the man in focus.

The man’s outlines and colors flickered, as though he were a magic lantern projection, but at the same time he radiated so aggressive an impression of physical volume that his body seemed to possess mass beyond its boundaries, as if it occupied more space than ordinary dimensions permitted — what quality was this that transcended volume, as volume transcended mere area? It took Crawford a moment to note the mundane details — dark curly hair, a mustache, an indistinct black coat, and eyes like glittering black glass.

The mud figures below him all suddenly spoke clearly, in unison: “My name has been John Polidori,” and Crawford knew that the man beyond them was speaking through them.

“You are the fleshly origins of this child,” the voices went on, “and she is ready now to abandon the cords of merely human flesh.”

McKee took a step forward on the concave ivory floor. “No,” she said in a loud but level voice, raising her little bottle of crushed garlic, “she is not.”

Crawford desperately wished she hadn’t advanced, but he made himself shuffle forward to stand beside her. The bright torchlight was still making him squint, and he couldn’t stare directly at Polidori — but in his peripheral vision he could see the little girl swinging his watch on its chain.

McKee threw the opened bottle toward Polidori — and several of the mud figures instantly splashed upward in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.

CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.

When the group had descended the stairs from the lawns to the crushed-stone yard, Swinburne exhaled and shoved his hands into his coat pockets and looked around at the mourners — and then his eyes widened and he stepped back toward the rear of the group.

Christina looked in the direction Swinburne had been facing and saw that Trelawny was staring after him.

Trelawny caught her gaze and fell into step beside her. The white-bearded old man’s back was straight and his shoulders were almost militarily squared — in something like defiance, Christina thought.

“Who is the young poet?” he asked.

Christina glanced back after Swinburne. “He is a poet, actually! Algernon Swinburne.”

“One of your damned crowd? I should have expected it.”

“He’s a friend,” said Christina, “an especially good friend to Gabriel and Lizzie.”

“I daresay.”

“Thank you for coming,” she remembered to say.

“You mentioned, Diamonds, that you know where that statue is—”

“I don’t want to think about — I don’t want to think,” she said desperately. “‘The world is a tragedy to those that think,’” she recited at random, “‘a comedy to those that feel.’”

She had reversed Walpole’s aphorism, but Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. “Even from here I can feel his attention on you still, like heat from a fire. I won’t question you now.” He frowned for a moment, then said, “I once bought a Negro slave, in Charleston, in America, it must be thirty years ago now — shall I tell you about that?”

“Oh, yes, please,” said Christina, exhaling as if she’d been holding her breath. “As long as it’s not … relevant.”

“No, not relevant to anything this side of the Atlantic. They’re fighting a war to free the slaves over there now — well, I did my part back in, let’s see, in ’34, by buying this fellow and immediately freeing him…”

As he rambled on, Christina listened hungrily to each distracting detail, though she noted every step that took her farther away from the grave and the thing in her father’s throat. Soon, she thought, soon, our uncle’s terrible attention will fall off me like a snagged cape.

THE BLACKLY SHIMMERING FIGURE of Polidori still stood holding the little girl at the far side of the chamber.

“Garlic,” said the remaining mud figures, and then they made a rackety snuffling sound. “Sulfur, that is, and an agent that interferes with us binding ourselves to the defining spiral threads of your fabric.”

McKee had straightened up from her throw and stood beside Crawford, panting. Crawford gripped his own bottle of crushed garlic in his pocket and waited tensely for Polidori to go on, but for several seconds none of the figures in the chamber moved, and the only sound was an occasional pop from one of the torches stuck into holes high up in the domed ceiling. Polidori seemed to have stopped paying attention to the two intruders, and the little girl in his flickering arms was swinging Crawford’s watch and quietly reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence.

Crawford’s gaze darted around the chamber, and he noticed a wavy seam across the top of the dome, and the term that occurred to him was coronal suture. He blinked sweat from his eyes and looked at the low curling ridge to McKee’s left, and he thought, ethnoid bone and cribriform plate. We entered through the right superior orbital fissure, and we are standing on the frontal bone.

On the far side of the chamber, Polidori was standing on the central ridge of the occipital bone. The mud things were standing down in the concavities of the temporal bone.

Crawford was suddenly shivering as if he were very cold, though he was able to think, objectively, We are inside a giant’s skull.

And as soon as he thought it, the light went dim and the air was moving and very cold and smelled of rust and wet stone; the floor under his feet had changed in an instant, and he skipped to keep his balance on what was now flat stone. He could hear water splashing and echoing.

His eyes were still dazzled by the vanished torchlight, and he took hold of McKee’s hand and peered ahead. The only light was a dim gray glow, possibly daylight reflecting down a shaft, from a gap in the arched stone ceiling.

They were standing on a projection of cracked old masonry, a stone ramp that was broken off jaggedly a yard in front of their boots, and below it rushed a shadowed stream about twenty feet across.

The tall darkly glowing figure on the far side, which at first Crawford mistook for a streak of residual retinal glare since it almost appeared to shift when he moved his eyes, must be Polidori.

Now Crawford could see that Polidori was standing on, or was projected onto, a similar broken ramp on that side; clearly there had once been a bridge across this stream. Crawford couldn’t see Johanna, but he heard her ongoing soft recitation mingle with the rattle of water against stone.

Polidori spoke in a deep and oily voice, and Johanna’s little-girl voice spoke too, matching his, syllable for syllable; Crawford was horrified to feel his own tongue and throat twitch, as if Polidori’s will were partly eclipsing his own too, even way over here on this side of the stream.

“The child and her organic father are strangers to each other,” said the voices of Polidori and Johanna, “but her mother loves her. The mother must be snuffed out.”

Johanna’s voice alone said, “Will you unravel her?” in a tone of mild curiosity.

“No, child,” answered Polidori’s not-quite-human voice, “that would leave a ghost unquiet in the river. I will crush her identity to nothing.”

McKee called hoarsely, “I do love you, Johanna!”

Crawford pulled his own bottle of garlic out of his pocket — there were apparently no mud men here to block his throw, and his free hand darted toward the screw-on lid—

— but Polidori had raised his arm, and the air solidified around Crawford’s hands and violently twisted the bottle away; he heard it splash into the stream.

“My garlic,” he whispered bleakly to McKee. “He reached across somehow before I could open it.”

McKee just exhaled.

“I’d like to have her ghost to keep with me,” said Johanna.

“You shall have the man’s ghost, if you like. I will simply kill him.”

“Unravel him?”

Polidori raised one hand.

Crawford grabbed McKee’s arm and took a quick step backward, but he was unable to pull her after him; he peered back to see what had caught her.

A black halo encircled McKee’s head, a ring so much darker than the surrounding gloom that it seemed to glow. Her face was in deeper shadow than it should have been, and he realized that her head was in a translucent globe that only looked like a ring because he was seeing the apparent boundary curve end-on.

He stopped trying to pull her. Crawford reached for McKee’s face — and he was able to push his hand into the dark globe against resistance, though tugging at her jaw didn’t move her head at all. He felt her rapid panicky breath on his hand in the moment before he drew it back — and then he took a deep breath and simply thrust his own head in beside hers.

The globe visibly expanded to enclose his head too, and he couldn’t hear or see anything, and his body had gone completely numb — he didn’t even know if he was still standing.

He was aware of two minds existing in a nonspatial proximity to his, one female and one male; the male one was in some sense vastly more prominent, and had begun exerting inexorable pressure on the female one, but—

Crawford’s mind spasmodically conjured up a string of images to fill the intolerable sensory vacuum and visualize what was happening: he imagined a walnut in a lever-operated nutcracker shaped like a squirrel with a gaping mouth; a hairy hand picking up one drinking glass and then fumbling it because it was actually two glasses, one nested in the other; a machinist stepping back from a workbench to wiggle one of the two handles of a pair of pliers so that the slip-joint would allow a wider spread of the jaws, for a grip bigger than had originally seemed necessary.

And then the imagined readjusted pliers were brought to bear and closed in and something began to go wrong with his mind. Memories intruded forcefully into his narrowed attention, broken and jammed together, like roof beams crashing into a bedroom under an unsustainable weight: the image of his son Girard replaced a dog that Crawford was cutting open for surgery; and he saw the heads of his parents on crows flying over the London Bridge; and his wife Veronica’s face instead of his own staring at him from a mirror, and then the mirror sprang forward and shattered against his forehead and Veronica’s mind was leaking into his.

Her memories were brutal — a hot haze of drunkenness veiled a dim view of naked men with the heads of bulls and birds of prey, and a wailing baby that was carried away by animated skeletons, and fingers tense on the wet grip of a knife—

And his flickering awareness grasped that these were not a distortion of Veronica’s memories, but of McKee’s—

Adelaide! he thought.

The psychic pressure increased, and he caught one last image from her smothered mind — it was of McKee in a white wedding dress in a church, and Crawford was standing beside her on the altar.

And then his mind was too compressed to sustain consciousness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AT FIRST CHRISTINA thought the sense of constriction signaled the onset of a headache or some distress in her stomach, and she shifted on the leather carriage seat and looked away from Cayley to face the window and take deep breaths of the cold fresh air. The carriage had passed under the stone arch of Highgate Cemetery’s entrance and rocked in a left turn onto the road, and she dreaded the shaking of the increased speed that was sure to follow.

But the uncomfortable tightness was somewhere else, not in her — somewhere in the oppressive and unceasing attention of her uncle.

“Are you well, my dear?” asked Cayley, leaning forward solicitously.

Polidori’s disembodied attention was all to do with squeezing and crushing something, and Christina had to breathe deliberately just to convince herself that she could. She held up her hand to put off answering Cayley.

And then it was gone. She had apparently moved at last out of the sphere of Polidori’s ground-state attention, and she felt all at once lighter and younger. The increasing headwind sluicing through the open window as the horses quickened their pace was pleasantly cooling on her damp forehead.

“Yes, Charles,” she said, her voice lively with surprised relief, “I’m fine.”

Deeply and gladly she inhaled the cold air, and she stretched her fingers on her lap, feeling as though she had at last shed a pair of gloves that she’d worn for decades.

His attention was always on me to some extent, she thought, during these seventeen years, and it’s finally completely gone.

I’m alone on my own.

LIKE A TAUT ROPE suddenly cut, the stretched awareness of the thing that was largely John Polidori snapped back — and then reflexively reached out again to reestablish the broken connection; and its attention fixed on what seemed to be its goal but was instead only streaks of familiar blood in grooves cut into a cluster of mirrors…

And the wave-form that was the Polidori thing’s identity was reflected back onto itself and instantly fragmented into a turbulence of nullifying contradictions and meaningless emphases.

A BOOMING CRASH OF collapsing masonry and the thudding of tons of dirt jarred Crawford, and he rolled over painfully on a wet floor, blinking at shadowed stone walls and coughing grit out of his throat. He could feel hot blood running from his nose and clotting in his mustache and beard, and he peered around him in the darkness, assuming that he was in a building that had partially collapsed.

He knew vaguely that there were a number of ages he might be, but he had no idea which of them might include this experience, whatever it was.

He could hear water rushing in a roofed channel very close by, and now he could dimly see that someone was lying on the stone floor near him — a woman. Had she been injured in the collapse? Had he? He tried to stop coughing and think.

Memories prickled in his consciousness, opening one clear area after another. He was older than he would have guessed, and he was wearing the torn ruins of a linen shirt and creased woolen trousers — he had been at a funeral! — and the dim radiance filtering down the shaft overhead was probably the light of a far-off overcast sky; the woman lying beside him was … was the mother of his daughter!

Then with a mental expansion that felt like his ears popping, he remembered it all, and he quickly rolled over to peer across the rushing stream; but through a haze of dust he saw that the stone platform and bridge-end that had been on that far side were gone now, buried under a new slope of jagged rock and freshly turned earth.

Johanna had been standing over there, with the Polidori thing.

He tilted his head back to stare up at the hole in the arched ceiling over the stream; the ceiling was high, and the light that touched the stone edges of the hole was very faint. He turned to look behind him, in the direction from which they’d come, but could see nothing.

He reached across and shook the woman’s shoulder. “Adelaide!” he whispered.

Her shoulder was yanked away and he heard her scramble into a crouch, suddenly panting.

“I’ve got a knife,” she gasped. “Come near me and I’ll kill you.”

“Adelaide, listen to me.” He got to his feet and reached toward her — then snatched his hand back and heard the blade whistle through the air where it had been.

“Keep back!” she said. “I’ll kill you and that Carpace bitch, both. Tell her—”

“Adelaide,” he interrupted, “Carpace is dead. I killed her. I’m John Crawford.”

She hesitated. “Killed her? What place is this? Strike a light.”

“I can’t. We’re underground, under Highgate Cemetery.” And our daughter is dead, he thought.

“Highgate — do you work at the Magdalen Penitentiary?”

“No, you’ve been out of there for … two years, I think you said.”

“What year is this?”

“1862. And we have to—”

“Ach, so old, all at once? And who are you?”

“John,” he said, “Crawford. I—”

“John!” For several seconds she didn’t move, and then her head whipped around to stare at the spot across the stream where the other stone platform had been.

And she wailed and fell to her knees when she saw the new slope of churned earth and rubble over there.

“Johanna!” she screamed; and then she screamed it again, making Crawford wince, but the third time her voice broke into sobbing.

After a few seconds, she caught her breath and choked, “What happened?”

“I don’t know!” He too was staring at the tumbled stone and dirt across the stream. “I–I believe I slowed him down, in his attack on you, when I interposed my head in his psychic vise — and then he began to crush us both — but I lost consciousness and revived only a moment before you did.”

“This is Sister Christina’s stroke,” said McKee softly. “It was her stroke that stopped him from crushing our minds, and crushed him instead — and my daughter.”

Our daughter, thought Crawford.

“There’s nothing more we can do,” he said. “We need to get out of here, back up to daylight.”

Slowly, panting as if she’d been running, McKee straightened and peered around in the darkness. To the right, the ledge they were on slanted uphill for at least some distance before it was lost in shadows, and he took her elbow.

She shook it off. “I saw into your head, when he was crushing us — you must have seen into mine.”

“I think so.” He remembered now the image of a wedding, but only said, “Just — distorted fragments.”

“That’s — all?”

“Yes. We’ve—”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes!” He spread his fingers and then clenched his fists and repeated, “We’ve got to get out of here!” He reached out and fumbled for her hand, but she snatched it away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Wha — why?”

“Why do you think?” She was still panting. “We tried to save Johanna, and we failed, she died. I failed, which is shameful, and you failed, which is shameful.”

“For God’s sake, Adelaide,” he said, starting forward along the ledge and then pausing, “what more could we have done? Damn me, how is it that we did as much as we did?”

McKee stared again for several moments at the jagged slope on the other side of the stream. Then, “Let me lead the way,” she said quietly, stepping around him, “and please don’t speak unless you perceive some danger along our course.”

THEY GROPED THEIR WAY through pitch-blackness, in silence except for the scuff and stumble of their boots on stone and in mud, and when they came to cross-tunnels, or broad areas that seemed spacious judged by the echoes of their breathing, McKee shuffled around until she had found the uphill direction, and they followed that — though several times it crested out and led them farther down. Twice Crawford saw hints of reflected firelight far away down what must have been side corridors, and at one point, when he and McKee were edging along a narrow ledge over a pit, he heard monotonous singing or chanting far below. They clambered blindly over heaped stones that sometimes felt as if they’d been shaped by tools, and made their way up out of waist-deep pools by climbing ancient stone stairs, and edged around boulders made of rusted-together pieces of metal — Crawford’s fingers traced corroded spoons and sword hilts and coins of unguessable age all stuck together like clusters of barnacles.

After at least an hour, he and McKee found themselves walking along a concave floor that was straight and smooth but very slippery — the smell was now very bad, like full chamberpots and rotten eggs — and Crawford heard McKee patting a wall.

“This is modern brick,” she whispered. “The Northern High Level Sewer between Hampstead and Stoke Newington, it must be. There’ll be a ladder.”

And there was, though to find it they had to climb over two chest-high brick walls that McKee called diversion dams. The ladder rang faintly when McKee’s groping hand collided with it.

Crawford gingerly patted his way around McKee and then preceded her up the new iron ladder, and when his head bumped a metal grating, he felt along the bars of it until he was touching the latch, and he managed to climb a few rungs back down as he lowered it on its hinges with one hand.

Above that was a square of solid iron, but it was hinged too, and he trusted the new ladder not to break under his boots when he braced his shoulders under the manhole cover and forced it upward. It squeaked up — he braced his hands in dazzling gray daylight on the steel rim embedded in the street pavement, and pushed — and then the cover fell away behind him with a loud clang that echoed between close housefronts.

He didn’t hear hooves or wheels bearing down on him, so before looking around, he scrambled out of the shaft and reached down for McKee’s hand. And when they had both got to their feet on the crushed stone of the street surface, and he had swung the iron cover back into place, and he and McKee had stumbled to a curb, he saw through narrowed eyes that they were in front of a pastry shop window.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” he croaked. “I’ve got some money.”

Then he flinched at a woman’s harsh voice from behind them. “Breaking into cellars, then, were you?”

Crawford turned toward the voice. In the gray but blinding daylight, an enormous woman in an apron was striding across the street toward them.

“You’re the ones made off with my pig, eh?” she went on loudly.

“No, no,” called Crawford hoarsely, “street collapsed in Highgate — women and children swept into the sewers—”

“Come along,” muttered McKee, grabbing his arm and pulling him into a trot.

“Get help!” yelled Crawford for verisimilitude over his shoulder. “Ropes, ladders!”

He had at least succeeded in baffling the woman, who had stopped and was looking uneasily at the manhole cover.

McKee had yanked Crawford around a corner and the two of them were now walking, as briskly as they could in their clinging wet clothes, against a bone-chilling headwind that made his eyes water. She had let go of his arm.

“Tea!” she said scornfully. “We look like we crawled out of a cesspool!”

Crawford looked at her as she strode along, then glanced down at himself.

It was true. Her dress and his shirt and trousers were slimed with what he hoped was just black mud, though in truth both of them smelled pretty horrible. His beard was stiff with dried blood, and McKee’s dark hair looked like a plundered bird’s nest.

They had been walking south down the middle of a rutted dirt road between old overhanging Tudor houses, stared at with disfavor but with no active interference by a couple of cart drivers who passed them, but now McKee stopped, hugging herself and shivering.

She faced Crawford and spoke clearly. “Our daughter is dead — and thank God she will at least stay dead, with the resurrecting devil killed too.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m leaving London. There’s nothing I can hope for in this city.” She squinted at him, as if to fix his face in her memory. “This village is Lower Clapton — I know it well, I’ve often caught birds near here. Kingsland Road is that way,” she said, waving to the east, “and if you walk south along it for two or three miles, you’ll get to the river at London Bridge. I suggest you jump right in.”

“Can I—” he began; then he shook himself and just said, “I wish you would stay.”

“It would only remind me of lost and impossible things. Everything you and I had in common is gone.” She turned and began striding away in the direction opposite to the way she had directed him.

“Adelaide!” he called after her, but she didn’t alter her pace.

When Polidori had vanished, Crawford had felt his mind popping by degrees back out to its former extent, like a half-crushed hat being poked back into shape; now one last dent seemed to spring back out, though it felt as if he’d been living with this one for years.

“Adelaide,” he yelled desperately, “marry me!”

She hunched in her ragged and fouled clothes, as if someone had thrown a stone at her, but kept walking — and through one last dissolving thread of the compaction that Polidori’s attack had imposed on their minds, he caught a final thought from her: So we can have more children?

Implicit in the thought were the names Johanna and Girard.

That froze him in place for a moment; then he was stumbling after her in his sopping trousers, ignoring the horrified cries of a crowd of children leaping out of his way.

McKee had rounded the corner of an old three-story whitewashed public house, and when he came skidding around it after her, she had disappeared.

A narrow lane or alley lay between the pub and a stable on the far side, and he hurried to it, but she was not visible between the old structures and there were no apparent doors or gates she could have gone through. A mongrel dog lying on the path lifted its head mistrustfully.

He walked back to the pub entrance, but as soon as he had pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped into the blessedly warm lamplit interior, several men in shiny corduroy jackets blocked his way.

“Smell too bad, you do,” said one of them, extending an arm to keep Crawford back.

“Don’t want us to bust you up, now, do you?” asked the other cheerfully. “Just shove off then, there’s a good boy.”

Crawford stepped back and stared at them while he caught his breath.

“I’m a friend of hers,” he said at last. “You must have noticed that she was as … soiled as I am.”

“Soiled women! Not in here, mate. And it’s up to her who her friends are.”

Crawford looked from one of the two amiably implacable faces to the other. McKee had said she caught birds near here, knew this village — doubtless she was known at this pub and had hastily told these friends of hers to keep him out.

Other men were visible now behind these two.

Crawford opened his mouth and yelled, “Adelaide!” as loudly as he could — and a moment later he was lying on his side in the road, clutching his abdomen and trying to get breath into his stunned lungs, and gradually realizing that one of the men had punched him very hard in the stomach.

He rolled over and saw the man grimacing and rubbing his knuckles on his sleeve.

Two men behind him in the doorway were now holding empty beer bottles by the necks.

Crawford waved and shook his head and slowly got back up on his feet, able now to take short, wheezing gasps.

The men in the doorway watched impassively as he struggled to catch his breath.

“I’m — leaving,” he finally managed to say. “Tell her — I love her.”

Their expressions didn’t change.

He turned away and began slowly plodding toward Kingsland Road, aching and limping and shivering in the cold.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GREEN LEAVES THREW waving shadows on the glass of the window overlooking Albany Street, and through the open front door swept a warm breeze carrying the scent of robinia blossoms.

Through the hall doorway Christina heard William shout, “This desk won’t fit through the door, nor fit back into the house. I think we’re going to have to break it into pieces.”

Christina laid down her pen and stood up, stretching.

“Leave it,” she called. “Gabriel can rub grease on it when he comes, and we can all push on it.”

William’s irritable call came back, “It’s not like a pig stuck in a fence, ’Stina, it’s — oh — well, you wouldn’t be joking about it if you—” He paused. “I think you’ll have to go down the steps,” he said, speaking out into the street, “and come up from the kitchen — or climb over this thing.”

Christina heard a squeak and a hollow dragging sound, and then steps in the hall, and Maria appeared in the hall doorway in a black linen dress, not looking as if she had just moved heavy furniture, as apparently she had.

Seeing Christina’s raised eyebrows, Maria shrugged and said, “It only needed a lift and a twist.” She looked around the parlor, with its bookshelves and upholstered chairs and framed pictures leaning out from the walls. “The Cheyne Walk house is a good deal roomier than this.”

“It’s lovely,” Christina agreed, her face blank.

Maria stared at her for a moment, then both of them laughed.

“He’ll have Swinburne living there,” said Maria. “I can’t quite see Swinburne and Mama playing whist together on winter evenings.”

“And the household finances will be a shambles.”

Christina’s book, Goblin Market and Other Poems, had been published two months ago, but though it had got enthusiastic reviews in journals like the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, and its three-thousand-copy first printing was reported to be selling well, she had no confidence that she would reap any substantial profit from it, and she was watchful of the family’s expenditures. Gabriel often bragged about making two thousand pounds a year with his paintings, but Christina and her sister and mother and aunt were all still living almost entirely on William’s income.

“He’ll be disappointed,” said Maria.

“Not really. He’ll have his noisy friends, and it would impede him to have women relatives about who rise before noon.”

Maria asked quietly, “How long do you think William will live there?”

“A month. Then he’ll be back here, at least half the time. He can’t be falling asleep at his office.”

“Still,” said Maria with a shiver, “I’m glad Gabriel has moved out of the Chatham Place house.”

“Well, yes.” Christina glanced at the waving green branches beyond the window to drive away memories of the winter — Lizzie’s death, poor Adelaide searching for her child, the waking vision of Mouth Boy in Regent’s Park, the alarming Trelawny.

The gambit Maria had come up with from her obscure studies had clearly worked — she and Gabriel had lost their sensitivity to sunlight, and Christina had even gone bathing in the ocean a few weeks ago! And she no longer dreamed of Polidori, in his own handsome form nor as the hideous Mouth Boy.

She had not written much poetry since the publication of Goblin Market—since Lizzie’s funeral, really — but at least she had not found herself writing any more of “Folio Q” either.

After seventeen harrowing years, John Polidori was no longer a part of her life, and she wanted no reminders of that darkly exciting passage. On the wall was still the portrait of Polidori — her mother’s brother, after all — but she never looked at that section of the wall.

But now she heard a familiar voice from out in the street: “William! Are you moving?”

“Stay,” said Christina to Maria.

“That poor man,” sighed Maria.

Christina stepped into the hall and walked to the street door. The desk was now out on the pavement, and William and John Crawford stood on either side of it.

“Hello, John!” called Christina, to save William the embarrassment of coming inside to ask if she was at home. “Do come in.”

John Crawford climbed the steps and followed Christina into the parlor, holding his hat. His hair and beard, Christina noted, showed streaks of gray that hadn’t been there five months ago, and his face seemed leaner.

“You remember my sister, Maria,” said Christina. “Can I get you some tea?”

“Miss Maria,” said Crawford, nodding. From his salutation he apparently thought Maria was younger than Christina. “No, thank you, I was just passing by your street—”

As so often, thought Christina.

“—and I thought I’d stop and ask if you might have heard anything of Miss McKee.”

“Not a word, I’m afraid. But as I’ve said, I’ll certainly—”

“I’m sorry, I know you’ve promised to let me know at once. It’s just that I worry…”

On his first visit after Lizzie’s funeral, Crawford had told Christina that the girl Johanna had died, and he had mentioned it again at least twice; Christina was weary of pity, and hoped he would not bring it up again.

“We really will let you know,” said Maria from the couch. Though unlikely to have any romantic attachments herself, or because of that, she had enormous sympathy for star-crossed lovers.

“But,” added Christina with an apologetic smile, “you must trust me to apprise you of any word of her as soon as I learn anything. These visits, so far out of your way—”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Crawford. He smiled at her, deepening the lines in his cheeks. “We were allies for a while, weren’t we?”

“In a campaign that succeeded,” agreed Christina. “A campaign that is over,” she added, perhaps a bit more forcefully than she meant to. “My uncle — the devil that wore my uncle — is dispersed in the grave.”

“And we part ways,” he agreed, stepping toward the hall. “‘One watching for the mere bright day’s delight, one longing for the night.’”

It was a couplet from Goblin Market. He nodded and walked out of the house, and Maria got up to watch him out the window.

“The poor man!” exclaimed Maria again.

“His troubles now are his own,” said Christina. “The troubles we shared with him are ended.” She walked over to stand by Maria and watched Crawford’s black-clad figure striding away north toward Albert Road.

“Ended,” she repeated firmly.