Hide Me Among the Graves

CHAPTER ONE

THE COPPERY LEAVES of the elms within the walls of Highgate Cemetery hung motionless in the still autumn air, but the yellow grass in the shadow of one north-facing gravestone was shifting. The grass blades, which had been flattened by rain earlier in the day, now stood up like a porcupine’s quills, and quivered.

Several minutes later a white point poked up from a hole in the middle of the patch of upright grass blades and rose to a height of a foot before expanding out in a makeshift parasol of muddy white silk. The shaft of the parasol was a long splinter of oak, polished on one side, and the bottom end of it was gripped by a tiny gray hand.

With a series of peristaltic ripplings, a wrinkled gray newt-like figure ejected itself up and out onto the wet grass, and it huddled under the canopy of dirty silk as its snake-like lower half separated into two legs.

In the long fingers of its free hand it carried a tiny fragment of broken mirror.

Its ribs flexed in and out for several minutes under its gray skin while its tiny black eyes swiveled around, scanning the clearing under the elms. Then it got its legs under itself and stood up; and the parasol wobbled over it as it took high steps to a rose bush a few yards away.

In a hollow under the rose bush, hidden from the view of any person more than three feet tall, was a substantial pile of tiny mirror pieces, and the gray creature laid this last one down and then hunched away to the roots of the nearest tree, and its spidery fingers began scrabbling in the damp dirt for beetles; when it found one, it stuffed the wiggling thing into its mouth and began chewing eagerly and immediately commenced digging for another.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI WAS STARING absently at one of the ukiyo-e prints that William had hung on the grasscloth-lined walls of the drawing room. The wood-block print, rendered in several colors by incomprehensibly patient Japanese artisans, was a view of a mountain that seemed to be floating in the white sky, and Christina was frowning, for there was something ominous in the idea of a mountain freed from the surface of the earth.

She looked away from it finally and laid down her pen in order to refill her glass from the sherry decanter. Her new physician, Doctor Jenner, had advised her to sleep late, eat plenty of carrageen seaweed jelly, and drink what seemed to Christina to be extravagant amounts of sherry.

Her ailment or ailments were obscure, their only symptoms being a constant cough and listlessness. Certainly this malaise was preferable to the anemia and angina pectoris and nightmares from which she had suffered prior to Lizzie’s funeral seven years ago. Sometimes Christina suspected that her present lack of energy and alertness, and Gabriel’s failing eyesight and insomnia, were consequences of being deprived of some supernatural sustenance their uncle had been providing … before they choked him with the mirrors at the funeral.

She sighed and got slowly to her feet, taking the glass with her to the French doors; they opened onto the first-floor balcony, and she blinked through the panes at the Ionic columns of St. Pancras Church across Upper Woburn Place, and at the red-and-gold trees in Euston Square off to the left. Evening had fallen, and only the topmost spires and chimney pots were still touched with a rosy glow.

Her brother Gabriel had found a house to rent in Cheyne Walk down in Chelsea, but two years ago the rest of the family had moved from Albany Street a few streets west of here to this house on Euston Square.

She opened the window door and stepped out onto the roofed balcony. The breeze was chilly through her flannel nightgown, and smelled of smoke from a hundred chimneys.

Of course they were still living on William’s salary from the Inland Revenue office, which only this year had risen to eight hundred pounds. Three years ago the banking and broking firm Overend Gurney had failed, and in the ensuing financial crisis and recession, many other firms had collapsed too — there had been panic and even bread riots — but William’s government position had insulated the Rossettis from anxiety.

None of the other siblings could help appreciably. Gabriel squandered his money. Maria was teaching Italian and had written a textbook, and Christina earned royalties on the British and American editions of Goblin Market, but together the sisters added less than two hundred pounds to the household income in a year. And Maria was forty-two and Christina was nearly thirty-nine now, and neither was likely to marry.

The leaves on the curbside chestnut trees were still green, and between the boughs she saw shiny carriages and hansom cabs whirring along Upper Woburn Place. Their neighbors here were respectable stockbrokers and lawyers, but Christina missed the old house on Albany Street, where most of the family had lived for thirteen years.

She had written poetry there, for a time.

She shook her head impatiently and took a sip of the sherry. What was she thinking — she still wrote poetry!

— At a more labored pace, and without the psychic spark she had felt while writing verses before 1862.

Some of the poems that she had written since then had been published by Macmillan three years ago, in a volume titled The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems … and the Saturday Review had noted “a good many tame and rather slovenly verses” and “a dull, pointless cadence” in it. In the Athenaeum, a reviewer had said, “We do not see the conflict of the heart, but the sequel of that conflict,” and had lamented that the tone of the poems was that of a dirge.

Christina drained the glass of sweet wine and clanked it down on the rail so hard that the stem snapped off.

My life has a dull, pointless cadence, she thought furiously; I am in the sequel of that conflict, and a dirge is the appropriate tone!

She still regularly wrote prose pieces — mostly religious short stories now, for the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine—but she couldn’t pretend that they had the sprightly warmth of the work she had done before 1862.

Well, so be it. If her inspired poetry depended on the attentions of a devil, she was incalculably better off without it.

She turned back toward the drawing room, glancing at her hand to see if she had cut herself. There was no blood, but her thumb and forefinger were stained with ink. What had she been writing, while staring idly at the Japanese mountain?

A notebook lay open on the table beside her chair, and she laid down the broken pieces of the glass and picked it up.

And when she read the first lines that she had written on the open page, she knew what it was — more of “Folio Q.”

Her face was suddenly hot. She repressed a quick smile but reached out with her mind to see if the remembered psychic attention was again there — and she sensed only vacancy, a yawning silence.

If his personal attention had been turned on her once again, after these seven years of absence, she wouldn’t have needed the evidence of the renewed story in the notebook; she would immediately have felt it in her mind like tingling in a newly unconstricted limb.

Seven years ago she had speculated to Gabriel and Maria that her uncle — ghost or vampire or whatever he was — was not deliberately writing through Christina’s hand at those times when she had found herself writing “Folio Q,” that Uncle John might not even have been aware that she had been physically transcribing his story.

Eagerly she scanned the lines, but though they were in the familiar handwriting of her uncle’s spirit, they were disjointed and rambling:

… there need not be … wisdom or even memory … shall I not one day remember thy bower, one day when all days are one day to me? You have been mine before — how long ago I may not know: but just when at that swallow’s soar, your neck turned so, some veil did fall…

So he was somehow up again, now, awake again, but the fullness of the old connection had not been restored.

She reached out again with her mind, but she could not sense him.

Evidently the mirror confusion they had imposed on him seven years ago, though it had not lasted forever as she and Maria had hoped, had at least severed the link that had connected her with her uncle since that night when, at the age of fourteen, she had rubbed her blood on the tiny statue.

If that were so, she could still go out in the sunlight without being burned … but by the same token she would still suffer from her current distracted listlessness … and she would still not be able to write the sort of poetry she had written before Lizzie’s funeral.

But perhaps Uncle John was simply coming back slowly, to his old attentive extent! Christina would have to go out into the sunlight to see if it once again stung.

And she urgently needed to speak with Maria and Gabriel. Maria was off teaching, but Gabriel would probably be at his house in Chelsea.

Christina hastily scribbled a note to Maria, then hurried to her bedroom to change into street clothes.

THE BAY WINDOWS OF the first-floor drawing room at Tudor House on Cheyne Walk faced the river and the shoreline elms and, farther off, the webby silhouettes of ships moored at the timber docks on the far side of the darkening water, but Gabriel Rossetti was looking impatiently toward the doorway in the southern end of the long room, beyond the big dining table and next to the cabinet full of Dutch china and Oriental curiosities.

He had just lit the gas jets, and now he laid the matchbox on the mantel of the marble fireplace. The burnt wood smell lingered in his nostrils.

“Yes?” he called again. “Dunn, is that you? Algy?”

He heard the scuff and rattle repeated in the corridor — and then two figures moved into the room.

The first was a small, thin boy draped in one of the black velvet curtains from the drawing room and carrying a ludicrous parasol made of sticks and dirty rags — on his feet he wore two cigar boxes that knocked and scraped on the wooden floor. Gabriel’s instant surprised anger chilled to horror when he looked more closely at the intruder’s face — the boy’s skin was gray and stretched so tightly over the teeth and cheekbones that the open mouth seemed to be simply the result of it splitting, and the eyelids looked inadequate to cover his blank black eyes.

But the second figure froze the breath in his throat — it was a tall, red-haired woman in a visibly damp white dress, and after seven years Gabriel recognized her face more by the hundreds of pictures he had done of it than by actual recollection — the face was that of his dead wife, Lizzie.

She was breathing audibly, and the floor creaked under her bare feet.

“Lizzie!” he burst out. He had tried, on a number of occasions since her death, to contact her in séances, but the spirits who had answered his questions had never really seemed to be her. Suddenly and terribly he missed her, missed the cheerful innocence that had first drawn him to her.

“Stay,” he went on dizzily, trying to ignore the hideous child beside her. “Don’t leave me again—”

The two figures interrupted him, speaking in unison; the child’s voice was a harsh quacking and the woman’s a metallic whine: “Call me Gogmagog.”

Gabriel flinched and stepped back, and he could feel his heart thudding rapidly in his chest. Now he could see the alien and almost inorganic alertness in the woman’s eyes, and he noted the slackness of the face.

“You’re the one—” he whispered; “I shot you, in the park — you can’t have my wife—”

The two figures took a step forward, and the fabric of the woman’s dress tore rottenly at the knee.

“We have both loved her,” they said again in their grating voices, “my husband and I. She has two true parents, a rarity.” The woman’s head inclined toward her small companion, and they went on, “My husband is free again now, but wounded — you need to renew your lapsed vows to him.”

Gabriel’s pistol was in his bedroom, dusty and neglected; he crouched to pick up a black iron poker from beside the fireplace, and he straightened and held it up like a fencing foil. “Cold iron,” he said, his voice shrilled by fear. “Come near me, either of you, and I’ll — I’ll bash you.” He squinted at the boy. “Are you her — husband?”

The little gray figure’s mouth opened wider, further exposing the prominent white teeth, and when he spoke now, the woman didn’t join him. “No — I am promised to someone else,” he said in his flat monotone. He waved a sticklike arm at the woman beside him. “Her husband is your uncle, who today I finally roused from his long sleep, which cost him much.”

The mirrors, Gabriel thought, the mirrors we put into Lizzie’s coffin. This awful child must have somehow removed them.

The walls of the parlor and entry hall downstairs were hung with dozens of mirrors — how had these two creatures got past them, if Maria and Christina were right about the properties of mirrors?

But the mirrors had apparently worked in the grave, at least for seven years. Gabriel now snatched up a silver platter from the table, scattering the letters and envelopes that had lain on it.

He held it up with the polished top side toward the two intruders.

“Look,” Gabriel cried, “look at your reflections!”

From behind the platter came their jarring, imperturbable voices: “Renew your vows. Invite him in.”

The sudden crash of shattering glass made Gabriel jump and drop the platter, which hit the floor with a ringing clang. He had scrambled back with his arm thrown up across his face, but his visitors were gone — apparently they had dived through the south bay window, for most of the panes were gone but no glass lay on the floor or the carpet.

Whimpering, he rushed forward through the suddenly cold air, but he ran toward the door to the hall and didn’t look at the window; and in the doorway he collided with a figure who was hurrying in. A glimpse of copper hair made Gabriel think that it was the vampire in Lizzie’s body again, and he grabbed for its throat—

But his hand closed on a stiff collar and tie and the lapel of a jacket; and, peering through tears, Gabriel saw that it was the much shorter and thinner figure of Swinburne.

“Gabriel!” Swinburne exclaimed, pushing his hand aside. “What on earth?”

“Algy,” gasped Gabriel, “Algy, I—”

Swinburne was peering past him into the drawing room, angling his oversized head to see down the length of it.

“Did they jump out the window?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes, Algy, they—!”

“Why?” Swinburne stared at Gabriel wide-eyed. “Gabriel, it was Lizzie! Alive!”

He ran past Gabriel to the window and leaned out through the ragged gap in the panes, his curly red hair blowing around his face.

“There’s no one visible below,” he said; then, “Christina!” he yelled out into the evening air. “Did you see anyone fall?” He leaned out as far as he could without touching the broken glass on the bottom edges. “Fall,” he repeated. “Oh, never mind, wait, we’ll be down in a moment!”

Gabriel made himself step up beside Swinburne at the window. He waved vaguely down at the figure of Christina, who had closed the street gate behind her and was hurrying toward the house, and then he cautiously inclined his own head out into the chilly breeze, but Swinburne was right — there were no figures on the narrow patch of grass or on the walk.

“Algy,” he said, “you were downstairs — did you invite them in?”

“Of course I did, it was Lizzie! — and some sick child. Come on!”

Gabriel stepped back from the window. “A dead child, Algy, and Lizzie was dead too. Is dead. That wasn’t her.”

“Of course it was her, she knew me! We’ve got to go downstairs; they’re probably hurt—”

Gabriel gripped his shoulder and shook him. “Algy, damn it, it was not her! It was a ghost, a demon in her form — do you think I wouldn’t know?”

“A demon?” Swinburne had raised his hands and now dropped them. He exhaled and brushed his windblown hair out of his face and squinted at Gabriel. “But it was not her ghost. I — that’s not how ghosts look, and her ghost — wouldn’t be here.” He looked out across the Cheyne Walk pavement to the dark river. “But she did know me,” he added quietly, almost to himself.

He looked back at Gabriel, and his eyes were bright. “A demon, you say?” And he actually laughed. “An archaic goddess, perhaps!”

Gabriel shook his head unhappily. “You don’t know anything about it, Algy.”

“Good God!” came a voice from the hallway door, sounding flat with no resonance from the missing window. Gabriel looked up to see his young assistant, Henry Dunn, gaping at the wide new gap in the windowpanes. “What happened?”

“I leaned on the glass,” said Swinburne.

Dunn stared expressionlessly at Swinburne for a moment, his mouth open, then said to Gabriel, “Your sister is here. Christina.”

And in fact Christina now hurried into the room right behind Dunn. She glanced from Gabriel to Swinburne through narrowed eyes, not even looking at the window.

“Algy,” she said, breathing hard as if she had run up the stairs, if not all the way from Euston Square, “I need to talk to my brother privately, if you would excuse us.”

Swinburne nodded and bobbed to the door. “It was a goddess!” he called before disappearing down the hall.

Dunn crossed to the remains of the window and pulled the curtains closed; they rippled, but they were heavy enough to keep out the river-scented breeze and the indistinct roar of the city. Then he nodded too and stepped back out of the room and closed the door.

“I saw two clouds of smoke,” Christina said, “—distinct, not dissipating in the air, like — splashes of ink in oil! — they burst out through your window and churned away over the river! Darker than the night! Our uncle John—”

“Is awake again; I know,” said Gabriel, pulling two chairs out from the table and slumping into one of them. “My visitors told me. My inky visitors. God.”

“It wasn’t him, himself, then,” said Christina. “Thank God for that.” She sat down in the other chair and took his hand. “Who were they?”

“One was a boy, like a starved corpse galvanized. The other—” He had run out of air, and had to take a deep breath to go on. “The other was — Lizzie. Or your Celtic queen, the one who died in A.D. 60, animating my Lizzie.”

“Lizzie? But she was blocked with mirrors too! Did they all dissolve?”

Gabriel rocked his head back and stared at the rings of gaslight on the high ceiling. “Corrode, tarnish, I don’t know.” He put a hand over his eyes, but his voice was still steady when he said, “My poor Lizzie! This thing said that what’s left of my wife has two true parents, meaning our uncle and this Boadicea creature.”

“And … the other one, the boy?”

“God knows who the boy is, or was. They said I need to renew my lapsed vows.” He gave his sister a bleak smile. “They said Uncle John is wounded — by your mirrors apparently, while they still worked.” He leaned forward to see the clock over the mantel, then glanced moodily at the waving curtains. “William is due soon for dinner. I suppose we’ll eat in the breakfast room, rather than in here.”

“That room has several mirrors,” Christina agreed. “And I left a note for Maria, saying to join me here.”

“All four suits together, Diamonds, to play this hand.”

Christina shook her head and pursed her lips. “I can’t imagine what William will think of all this. But we’ve got to try to warn him.”

“He’s big on science. We’ll tell him that it’s all to do with magnetism.”

WILLIAM STOPPED AT THE Euston Street house to refill his tobacco pouch — Gabriel’s guests always smoked up the tobacco he left in a box on the mantelpiece at Tudor House — and so he and Maria arrived there together in the cab William had hired.

William only spent a night or two a week in his room at Tudor House, because, unlike Gabriel, he generally had to arise at eight in the morning to be at his office at the Board of Inland Revenue in Somerset House by ten. He was forty years old and had worked there since the age of fifteen, and he was now the assistant secretary in the Excise Section.

His real allegiance was to art and poetry, but he had no particular skills in them himself — he had written a translation of Dante’s Inferno, but Macmillan had rejected it twelve years ago and reconsidered eight years later only because William’s mother contributed fifty pounds toward the expense of its publication — and he tried to be content with being a financial and emotional support to his sister and brother as they pursued their areas of genius. He was currently devoting a lot of his free time to editing a collection of Shelley’s poetry, a project that had brought him into contact with Shelley’s oldest-surviving and most controversial friend, an old pirate named Trelawny.

Neither he nor Maria noticed the broken first-floor window as they stepped from the cab through the streetlamp radiance to Gabriel’s iron gate, but Christina met them on the walkway and hurried them inside, glancing nervously at the dark sky.

She led them upstairs to the studio, where they found Gabriel staring at his painting Beata Beatrix, a portrait of his dead wife, Lizzie, as Dante’s Beatrice. The painting, still unfinished seven years after it was begun, portrayed Lizzie in three-quarter profile with her eyes shut, as a dove dropped a poppy into her limp hands; behind her stood the indistinct figures of a man in black and a woman in red, who Gabriel said were intended to represent Dante and Love.

William had always thought it was a morbid picture — the Dante and Love figures looked sinister in their shadowy blurriness, and he thought it was in doubtful taste to show a poppy being given to a woman who had died of an overdose of laudanum, which was a potent mix of opium and grain alcohol.

William stepped carefully around the many half-finished paintings that lay on the floor to the fireplace, but the tobacco box was once again empty. Grumbling, he fished his old briar pipe and tobacco pouch from his coat pocket.

Christina had pulled Maria down beside her onto the sofa. Behind them was a small window blocked with the dead leaves of one of the trees in the back garden.

Gabriel was tugging at his goatee and scowling as he paced the floor between the pictures, and when William had finally drawn up one of the easy chairs, and raised his eyebrows quizzically as he struck a match to his pipe, Gabriel said, “Lizzie was just here. Lizzie. Christina saw … saw her exit, right through one of the drawing room windows. She then apparently flew away.”

“Oh no,” moaned Maria, clasping Christina’s hand. “The mirrors…?”

“Mirrors?” asked William, keeping his voice merely level.

“It’s magnetism!” blurted Christina, and then blushed.

Gabriel curtly explained to William that the three of them had surreptitiously lined the bottom of Lizzie’s coffin with downward-facing mirrors stained with Christina’s blood; the ghost of their suicide uncle was apparently in the coffin directly below Lizzie’s, in their father’s coffin — and Gabriel claimed that the “corporeal kernel” of their uncle’s ghost, or possibly vampiric devil, was a tiny statue lodged in their father’s throat.

William cleared his own throat and shifted in his chair. “Did — did you say,” he asked, “in Papa’s throat?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel levelly.

“I see.”

For a moment no one spoke, and William just puffed on his pipe, and the tarry smell of latakia tobacco drove away the big room’s usual scent of linseed oil. He considered asking how they believed they knew this, but the thought of the occult explanation that would surely follow wearied him in advance.

Then he thought of all the mirrors that were hung throughout the house — so many that a visitor saw more of himself than of his companions.

“But why mirrors?” William persisted.

Gabriel explained that if one of these creatures—one of them? thought William — could be induced to fix its attention on a mirror, its identity would be reflected back on itself, causing its identity to fragment.

“Any order in its field would arguably be lost in interference fringes,” conceded William, nodding. He looked at Christina. “This is what your ‘Folio Q’ was about, I think?”

“Yes, but not specifically enough,” she said. “Maria repeated some of Papa’s studies to discover it.” She squinted miserably at William. “I know you don’t believe any of this—”

“That’s not quite true,” he said carefully, “any longer. I frankly admit I’m dubious of this story, but ever since the night when — on the night I’m sure you remember, when you did some automatic writing in my presence in the old house on Albany Street, I’ve been investigating spiritualism.” He glanced at Gabriel.

“It’s true,” Gabriel said. “We’ve held séances in this house.”

“Oh, William, Gabriel, no!” exclaimed Maria. “Consulting the dead!”

William smiled and leaned back. “It’s science, Maria! Possibly magnetism, as Christina said. I’ve been to a good twenty séances, here and elsewhere, and now I’m at least willing to concede the possibility that there is some sort of life after death.”

“You should have been here ten minutes ago,” growled Gabriel. “You’d have conceded it and then some. Algy saw her too, saw Lizzie.”

“And I’ve been writing more of ‘Folio Q,’” said Christina mournfully. “Our uncle is clearly active, though the writing seemed distracted; there were no clear statements.” She spread her hands. “The mirrors have somehow stopped working.”

“Lizzie—” said Gabriel, “the Lizzie thing — said that he’s wounded now, at least.”

Christina shuddered and said, “I wonder if the statue is even still in Papa’s grave? I remember the gravediggers at Lizzie’s funeral pointing out what they called a ‘mole hole’ that went all the way down.”

“Wait a moment,” said William. “This statue — is it that little black one that Papa kept on a shelf in his bedroom?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel.

William remembered the childhood nightmares that had always stopped when their father put the statue in a glass of salt water. “I begin,” he said cautiously, “to find this marginally plausible. Why is it in Papa’s throat?”

“He choked on it,” said Christina.

William opened his mouth to ask how that had occurred, but Gabriel was already speaking.

“If it is still there,” said Gabriel, “we need to exhume it and destroy it once and for all.”

“Impossible, surely,” said William, “for a dozen reasons! For one, you can’t … cut open our father’s throat! And in any case, you couldn’t do it on the sly — there are night watchmen.”

Gabriel held up a hand and then stepped to the fireplace, where he lifted a brandy decanter and poured a couple of inches of liquor into a used coffee cup. He drank it off in two quick gulps, then said, quietly, “As to your first objection, William, I think the presence of that thing in Papa’s throat defiles his final rest.”

The sisters nodded, Maria grudgingly.

Gabriel gave his siblings a defiant look. “And as to the second — I’ve been in correspondence with Henry Bruce. Do you remember him?”

William tamped the smoldering tobacco in his pipe and frowned. “Involved in your commission to paint the altarpiece in the cathedral at Cardiff?”

“That’s the man. He was member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil at the time. He’s now the Home Secretary.” Gabriel took a deep breath. “I have lately concluded that Millais and Burne-Jones outstrip me in the execution of art.”

“Nonsense,” said William, and Christina echoed him.

“That’s kind of you to say, but, begging your pardon, even though my eyesight is failing, I can see that much. And so I’ve decided to establish my name in poetry instead — or as well, at least.” His face when he looked around was tensely expressionless. “Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he was blind.”

William raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Well,” said Gabriel, “don’t you see? I want to stand now on my poetry, but my best poems are—”

“Oh, Gabriel!” burst out Christina. “Not the notebook you laid in her coffin!”

“That was a sacrifice,” Gabriel nearly shouted, “and for seven years I’ve endured the sacrifice!” More quietly he went on, “This is, must be, kept a secret, for all our sakes — if it should somehow become known that I did it, and you hear of it, you must react as you would if this conversation never took place. That is, dismiss it, deny it. I implore your thoroughness in this, for all our sakes. But the Home Secretary has officially granted me permission to exhume Lizzie.”

“Granted you permission?” said Maria. “But you’re not the owner of the grave — Mama is.”

“That was an obstacle,” said Gabriel, nodding, “but I prevailed with the argument that it was the grave of my wife.”

“Was it,” said Christina slowly, “only your poems that you hoped to retrieve?”

She seemed to brace herself as she asked the question, as though it might provoke Gabriel, but Gabriel just gave his sister a haggard smile. “If my purpose had been to free our uncle from the mirrors and revive my strangled Muse—our strangled Muse! — I would have abandoned the plan tonight, when we learned that he is in fact somehow free of them now. I don’t want the — the consequences of his help anymore, but I would like to have the work I did in the days when I had his help.”

“Muse?” said William. “Help?”

Gabriel bobbed his head and waved toward Christina.

She pursed her lips and shifted on the sofa. “These things are vampires, and — and when they’ve established a connection with you, one of the results is often that you write … a better sort of poetry than you could do unaided.”

William shivered. A better sort of poetry than you could do unaided.

“Gabriel and I haven’t written first-rate poetry since Lizzie’s funeral,” Christina added.

“And they sustain the lives of their human … partners,” grumbled Gabriel. “I don’t think Christina would be an invalid now if we had not strangled him at Lizzie’s funeral — and I don’t think I would be losing my eyesight.”

William found that he was suddenly eager to believe this story, and he tried to revive his habitual skepticism. He turned to Gabriel. “What are the consequences that you don’t want?”

“These vampires,” said Gabriel, “love the humans whom they initiate into their family—”

“Initiate with their teeth,” said Christina quietly.

“—and,” Gabriel went on, “they are toweringly jealous of anyone whom each new family member has previously loved. They — kill any such, unless those have been initiated into the family themselves.”

“But … will your eyesight recover now — now that our uncle is … somehow awake again?”

“No,” said Christina and Gabriel together. Christina went on: “Our connections with him were evidently broken when we shut him down at the funeral, and so the people we love are still safe — as long as we continue to resist him.” She turned an anxious look on Gabriel. “How did Lizzie get into the house tonight? I gather you didn’t invite her.”

“No, Algy did. Her and this starved dead boy.” To William and Maria he said, “Lizzie was accompanied by what must have been the ghost of a boy, though he — seemed unusually solid, for a ghost. I don’t know who he was.”

William stood up, still trembling. “It will be one thing to legally exhume Lizzie,” he said, “and retrieve your poems. But it will be quite another to dig further, and break open our father’s coffin, and then actually cut open his throat! We should establish first whether or not that statue is still there. Our uncle’s recent activities may be the result of this statue’s having lately … dug its way out?”

“What sort of dowsing rod would you use?” asked Gabriel.

William smiled. “We should hold another séance here, with Diamonds and Clubs joining Hearts and Spades, for a full deck.”

“I will not participate in any such thing!” exclaimed Maria.

“You can watch,” said William, suppressing impatience, “and in proximity pray more effectively for our souls.”

Christina didn’t look any happier about the idea. “But who — what spirit would we ask to speak to?”

“Uncle John himself, I would think,” said William. “Or, failing that, Lizzie — she was lying right over him; it’s likely she would know.”

“It’s time we went in to dinner,” said Gabriel. “It’s to be in the green breakfast room tonight, and Algy is probably getting impatient.” More quietly he went on, “Let’s hold the séance soon — on a night when Algy isn’t here.”

IN THE SHADOWS OF the hall, Swinburne stepped back from the doorway and hurried to his room so that he could pretend to have been asleep when someone came to summon him.

CHAPTER TWO

A THIRD OF A mile north of Tudor House stood Pelham Crescent, a semicircular row of splendid white houses designed thirty years earlier by Elias Basevi, who had also been the architect of Belgrave Square. Separated from one another by iron railings like rows of upright black spears, each house’s doorway was up three steps from the pavement and framed by square pillars that supported a first-floor balcony. The gentlemen who entered or alighted from glossy carriages at the curb wore tall silk hats or the newer round creations of William Bowler, and their starched linen collars and cuffs were bright spots against well-tailored black overcoats.

From Number 7 on this February evening, though, emerged a contrary figure in a brown sack coat with an open-collared shirt and no hat; his white beard was untrimmed and his glance up and down the street was arrogant. Edward Trelawny waved his cane, and a hansom cab obediently slanted in to a rocking halt in front of him.

“New Cut Market,” he called to the driver, flipping a half-crown coin toward the man’s perch behind and above the cab.

The driver turned the coin carefully in the dim radiance of a streetlamp, but it evidently appeared genuine, for he tucked it into a pocket and nodded.

Trelawny snorted and stepped up into the cab.

As the long reins snapped over the roof and the cab surged forward, Trelawny sat stiffly upright, scornful of the padded seat back, but inwardly he was uneasy, and he was cautiously reassured by the angular bulk of the pistol tucked behind his belt buckle.

He had not seen anything of the terrible Miss B. for seven years now, not since two days after that Rossetti woman’s funeral. At that funeral he had learned the identity of the woman previously known to him only as “Diamonds,” and he had called on her at noon the next day.

She had received him in the parlor of a modest house in Albany Street, with her fat sister sitting beside her on the sofa while he sat in a chair on the other side of a table on which rested an array of tea and biscuits, which he had ignored.

“MY CONDOLENCES, ON YOUR loss,” he had said formally.

“Thank you,” said Christina Rossetti.

“You mentioned, Diamonds,” he said, “that you know where that statue is buried.”

The sister — Maria — turned a startled look on Christina, but Christina stared evenly at Trelawny and said, “It doesn’t matter now. We have strangled it.”

“You did indeed,” he acknowledged with a respectful nod. “Last night I visited an acquaintance south of the river, a woman who was afflicted by your uncle—”

At that point Maria burst out, “How does this man know these things?”

“Mr. Trelawny is an ally,” said Christina, and she smiled. “At least as much of an ally as we can hope for. Do go on.”

“This acquaintance of mine,” said Trelawny, “was distraught. For some months she has been receiving your uncle in rooms above her dolly shop in New Street, and hers is the only such shop without a crucible glowing away in a back room for melting down stolen silver, since your uncle doesn’t approve of metals. She was on the roof last night, weeping, and her fingers were all chewed bloody in desperate hope of calling him back.” Trelawny spread his hands. “That would have drawn him, if he’d been conscious anywhere in the British Isles! But she remains bereaved, and her old illnesses, which he had held back, are on her again.”

No one spoke as he pulled a cigar from his coat pocket, though he frowned and put it away again when he saw Maria wince. Finally he said, “You don’t want to tell me where the statue is buried.”

“No,” admitted Christina.

“If you are certain that you have somehow killed your uncle, then it doesn’t matter. Without him, his spouse — my patron, whom you saw Monday last in Regent’s Park and whom your brother shot—”

“Gabriel shot someone?” exclaimed Maria. “With that gun of his? ’Stina, you didn’t tell me?”

Christina waved her hand impatiently. “She wasn’t human,” she said, “or not very much so. She seemed more to be a dog — a dog wearing clothes, that is. And when Gabriel shot her, she burrowed into the ground like a sand crab.”

Trelawny laughed at the expression of baffled dismay on Maria’s face.

“If, as I say, you are certain that you’ve killed him, then I don’t need to know where he’s buried, since his poor maligned spouse — you really didn’t see her at her best — cannot accomplish their purpose alone. But I would like—”

“What is — was — their purpose?” asked Christina.

“My patron,” said Trelawny, “would like to do again what she did in A.D. 60.”

“You will explain all this to me,” said Maria stiffly to Christina, “with diagrams, directly after this conversation.”

“Yes, Maria, I’m sorry!” To Trelawny she said, “But what did she do in A.D. 60? Besides die? Oh! She burned London.”

“It burned,” agreed Trelawny, “but first she shook it to pieces.”

“You mean Boadicea,” said Maria. “She was, or is, one of these things like our uncle, I presume.”

Trelawny bowed in his chair. “I see it’s only Gabriel who is witless among your family.”

“You haven’t met,” began Christina; “—oh, never mind.”

“He’s not dead,” said Maria quickly, as if in spite of herself, “our uncle. Just … perpetually disrupted, shattered — cross-eyed!”

“How were they intending to destroy London?” asked Christina, apparently as much to change the subject as from curiosity. “It’s a much bigger city these days!”

“The same way she did before,” said Trelawny. “She and her daughters had been consecrated to the old British goddess known as Andraste and Magna Mater and Gogmagog, and then one of her daughters was raped by a Roman who was consecrated to a similar goddess in the Alps — the effect requires parents from two continents — and with certain rituals the birth of the resultant child was made to flex the continents, physically, like bending a sheet of glass.”

“An earthquake,” said Maria.

“That’s it,” said Trelawny. “And she would like to be that sort of catastrophic ‘grandmother’ again — to have one of her forcibly adopted family of the British goddess beget a — beget what you might call a ‘child’—by a victim of the European devil that animates your uncle.” He shrugged. “Snap the continental whip again.”

“‘Consecrated to,’” said Maria fastidiously, “means ‘bitten by,’ I gather.”

“To put it vulgarly,” agreed Trelawny.

“Are you … consecrated to her?” asked Maria.

“No — not that way, at least, not as consummated as that. Shelley was, but he was born into it, poor old fellow; and Byron was, but he had no self-control. I did invite her into my house twelve years ago, but I was able to protect myself and my family from her. I’m in a privileged position — I’m the precious Rosetta stone between the two species, the bridge, as long as I’ve got this half statue growing in my throat—”

Maria looked helplessly at Christina, who rocked her head and waved reassuringly.

“—but because I invited her in, she sticks to me like my shadow. I’d like to free myself, and even more so the world, from Miss B. Therefore—”

“‘Miss B.!’” exclaimed Maria with a smile. “That’s genteel.”

“Fewer syllables to say. Therefore, I would like to know how you managed to ‘disrupt and shatter’ your uncle.”

“So that you may do it with Miss B.,” said Christina, “who is — you said — your patron.”

“Soon to be my former patron, if you’ll tell me how.”

“But, as you say, you would still be the bridge, the Rosetta stone.”

“That’s right, and the simplest thing to do would be to have the statue cut out of my throat, you mean? — and then the overlap between the species will be gone, and the vampires will all be ‘melted into air, into thin air.’”

He picked up his cup of tea and drained it; it was lukewarm, and he wished they had served plain cold water instead. “The man who previously served as the Rosetta stone, the overlap between our species, a centuries-old Austrian, had his ambassador-statue cut out of him in 1822. He died of it.”

“Are you particularly afraid to die?” asked Maria; she was so earnest that he felt obliged to answer the question seriously.

“I’ve risked my life a hundred times,” he told her, “sometimes frivolously. But I’m convinced that this life, this mortal coil, is all there is. ‘Our little life is rounded with a sleep,’ and there’s no Heaven or Hell afterward. I’m seventy years old, and with luck my purse of years is nearly emptied, but while I don’t mind laying my remaining days down on a decent wager, I don’t want to simply toss them away.”

Maria nodded sympathetically and said, “Or even spend them, on saving the lives of strangers?”

Trelawny took a deep breath and repressed an irritable reply. After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”

She smiled faintly. “Yes.”

“I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”

He smiled. “But if you’ll tell me how you got your uncle cross-eyed, I can do it to Miss B., and then I don’t think there will be any active vampires left in England.”

“But don’t their victims who die become vampires, in turn?” asked Christina. “There must by now be a number of those about.”

Trelawny exhaled through clenched teeth. Could these women not answer a plain question?

“My suspicion,” he said carefully, “is that your uncle and Miss B. have sustained any such; without that sustenance, any second-generation vampires will probably just fall down belatedly dead, like marionettes with the strings cut. Your uncle’s are now presumably laid to rest — I’d like to do the same for my patron’s.”

“Probably,” said Christina. “Presumably.”

“Your suspicion,” added Maria.

Trelawny smiled coldly and got to his feet. “I apologize for wasting your afternoon, ladies. Perhaps your brother would be good enough to shoot her with his silver bullets again, from time to time.”

“Mirrors,” said Maria quickly.

Christina sighed. “Do sit down, Mr. Trelawny.”

Trelawny resumed his seat and leaned forward, raising his white eyebrows.

“My sister appears to have faith in you,” Christina said. She blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I trust you’ll use this information as you say, and not to help your … patron protect herself!”

“I will use it as I say.”

“Very well.” Christina bit a fingernail, then spoke in a rush: “These creatures won’t ordinarily fix their attention on a mirror, because it would reflect their identities back on themselves, you see, and that’s like — apparently it’s like randomly rearranging a complicated first-person sentence, so that the verbs and adjectives and nouns are all in the wrong places, and it’s all just contradictory gibberish.”

“They can no longer utter themselves,” put in Maria, “as it were.”

“But,” Christina went on, “if you scratch lines in the glass and rub some of your blood into the lines, the creature will focus on it, out of its love and concern for you.” She blinked several times rapidly and looked away, and Trelawny realized that she had to some extent loved her uncle too.

Maria took up the slack. “Then keep that mirror in position — I’d advise putting her and the mirror in a box together, and hiding the box in a secret place. It needn’t be a big box, probably — she’s likely to diminish in substance a good deal.”

THAT WAS SEVEN YEARS ago, Trelawny thought as the hansom cab rattled south through the lamplit streets of Chelsea toward Battersea Bridge, and I’m seventy-seven years old now. And I did not succeed in catching Miss B. in a mirror — though I did manage to drive her away from me. That has been a relief, I do steadfastly insist.

DIRECTLY AFTER LEAVING THE Rossetti sisters’ house in Albany Street on that February afternoon in 1862, he had bought a three-foot-tall framed mirror and scratched the glass and rubbed blood from a cut finger onto it, and then he had set it in the chair he usually occupied, and himself sat down cross-legged behind it with a pipe and a book of Shelley’s poems to wait for twilight and Miss B.

It was a nostalgic and half-melancholy vigil. Miss B. had loved him, in spite of his evasions and derelictions and their unconsummated pairing, and in the twelve years since the night when he had found her in the ravine outside King’s Norton she had shown him marvels that had astonished even him, who had fended off vampires in Italy and questioned ghosts with Lord Byron in Athens and ridden with devils in the gorge below Mount Parnassus!

Trelawny put down the pipe and the book and leaned back against the chair legs, staring into the fire in the grate.

She had shown him visions of the earth as it had been before the sunlight changed, before the air was poisoned by the harsh, flammable element exhaled by the spreading greenness — when the creatures later called Nephilim or fallen angels had filled the red skies with their yet-unwithered wings and shaken the young mountains with their glad choruses…

And on moonless nights she had taken him out in a boat on the western sea, where the luminous curtains of the aurora borealis were reminiscent mirages of the walls of long-perished palaces…

And she had offered him immortality, of a much more tangible sort than what the Rossetti girls looked forward to in their Christian faith … but it would have required that he renew it periodically.

Trelawny shuddered behind the chair at the thought of that bloody, predatory renewal. He shook his head. In his arrogant youth he might have been able to extend his life by taking the lives of others, but he certainly could not do it now.

There was the rap of a boot on the hall floor—

And then he heard Miss B. fling open the chamber door and step heavily into the room, and he huddled motionless behind the chair. Look at the mirror, he thought; look at my blood. In spite of the fire, the air was suddenly so cold that he could see his breath.

“I see through it to you,” came her voice, heavy as gold. “I see through you.”

The floor jumped under Trelawny and the curtains swayed across the rocking walls, and as he clutched at the carpet he heard pictures and books hitting the floor, and gritty plaster dust sifted down onto his gray head and he heard a loud clank behind him, which must have been the mirror falling forward out of the chair and landing face-down on the heaving floor.

“You are the translation bridge between our kinds,” said her voice. “I must not kill you. I withdraw from you.”

And then his ears had popped and the window had burst inward with a crash, and a powerful draft had knocked the chair over and flung papers out into the hallway — and she was gone.

AND SHE DID WITHDRAW, he thought now as his cab rattled over Battersea Bridge. Looking out through the side window, over the forward-rushing rim of the left wheel, he watched distant boats silently interrupting the moon’s glitter on the water. Seven years it’s been, now, since I’ve laid eyes on Miss B., though she’s presumably still active, somewhere, with somebody. Well, that poet, for one — Swinburne.

On the south side of the bridge, the cab angled northeast through Kennington to the Lambeth Road; and when they arrived at Waterloo Bridge Road, the glow in the sky and the increasing roar of a hundred raised voices let Trelawny know that they were on the threshold of the New Cut. Soon the cab halted, blocked by dozens of milling pedestrians.

He climbed down from the cab and stood for a moment in the middle of the crowded, noisy street; behind him the rows of houses were lost in darkness in spite of the dim yellow rectangles of windows, for ahead of him the street was spangled with dazzling constellations of red and white and yellow light; gas jets fluttered over butcher shops, the pearly glare of gas lamps eclipsed the ruddy radiance of grease lamps, and candles and dips stood everywhere, in glass chimneys at the doorways of shops and stuck into vegetables on the high-piled carts of costermongers. The night breeze was from the east, funneling down the churning street, and it carried a pungent mix of smells: curry, candle wax, fish, perfume…

Booths crowded both sides of the street, and in the space of six yards Trelawny could have bought bootlaces, tin saucepans, or a smoked codfish nearly as tall as himself; and he threaded his way between gentlemen in silk hats, tradesmen in caps and leather aprons, and headless dummies wearing embroidered waistcoats and Norfolk jackets. From all sides rang the din of vendors announcing their wares: “Hot chestnuts!” and “What do you say to these cabbages?” and “Three a penny, don’t pass it up!” and “Here’s your bloaters!” as if Trelawny had misplaced the disreputable fish in question and had been looking all over the city for them.

As he stepped around some pedestrians and was jostled by others, he kept one hand on his belt buckle, directly over the pistol tucked into his trousers; he wasn’t risking some pickpocket making off with it.

Above all the flares and banners on the south side of the street stood the theater he remembered as the Coburg, now known as the Royal Vic, the Corinthian capitals of its four tall pilasters underlit by the lights below, and behind the high scalloped cornice he could just see the brick structure that had been built to hold the stage’s famous crystal curtain, which could not be rolled or folded but had to be raised all of a piece.

Trelawny didn’t believe he’d been followed, but he made for a gin shop he knew of on the east side of the theater.

The door was already ajar, spilling a streak of yellow gaslight across the stained pavement, and though in pushing it farther open he nearly knocked down a burly fellow standing just inside, Trelawny’s fierce gaze made the fellow merely touch his cap and shuffle backward. Trelawny nodded by way of token apology and stepped inside.

Just by the smell, Trelawny could tell that the place had apparently converted from gin to rum since he had last visited — the warm sweet reek of it nearly overpowered the tobacco smoke that hung in layers under the low wooden ceiling, and a big cask rested on a shelf behind the bar with a sign on it that read CHOLERA MIXTURE! He recalled reading that a doctor had recently advised rum as a preventive for that disease, and apparently all the men and women in this narrow gas-lit room were busily attending to their health — though the place still served drinks in pewter mugs, which were reputed to get a person drunk faster than ceramic or glass vessels did.

The white-haired landlady who sat behind the bar took a blackened clay pipe out of her mouth when she saw him.

“Trelawny, you villain,” she said, “don’t you trust me?”

He recalled that he had loaned her money at one time.

“Keep it,” he said curtly. “I just want to pay my respects to Oatie.”

“I remember that!” she exclaimed, giggling toothlessly. “It’s been a while since anyone gave the poor old soul a thought. I think the door’s locked — here. You can leave the key in the lock; I’ll send a boy after you to fetch it back.”

Trelawny grinned and caught the tossed key, then strode toward the back of the place. Oatie Granwell had been a scissors-and-knife sharpener who had died in 1836, and after his wake had been held in the back room of this place, people had for years continued to use “paying respects to Oatie” as an excuse to leave by the back.

When Trelawny unlocked the door at the far end of the room and swung it open, he saw that the entire rear chamber was gone — he was standing in a dark alley by the loading bay doors of the Royal Vic. Quickly he sprinted across the pebbled pavement to a remembered set of stairs, and when he had climbed them to the narrow unlit first-floor balcony, he was relieved to see that the old beam still spanned the ten-foot gap between this balcony’s railing and the roof of a bakery next door. He hopped nimbly up onto the rail, and then stepped carefully across, disdaining to hold his arms out for balance.

And on the bakery roof he was pleased to find that he remembered the path between the skylights; even in daylight they were hard to discern, being as black with soot as the rest of the roof surface, and he knew from experience that an unaware pursuer would inevitably put a foot through one black pane or another.

From the coping on the far side of the roof he leaped across a four-foot gap to the next building, a boardinghouse, and a couple of groggy drinkers sitting by the stairway shed looked up at his booming arrival on the roof, but they made no objection as he stepped over them and clattered away down the interior stairs.

When he stepped out through the south door of the place, he was in New Street, and the only light now was the faint glow behind him in the foggy sky over New Cut; by memory more than sight he found the recessed doorway of Number 12 on the far side of the street, and he groped his way up the dark stairs within.

At the top of the stairs he paused on the landing, straining his eyes to see in the near-total blackness.

This morning in his house in Pelham Crescent he had glanced at the mantelpiece and noticed that the ace of spades had fallen over inside the glass dome he thought of as his Byron bell jar.

In 1824, in Greece, Trelawny had clipped a lock of hair from Lord Byron’s corpse, and after the Rossetti woman’s funeral in 1862, he had glued a strand of the hair to the playing card so that the card was held nearly upright, and then he had set a lit candle beside it and sealed the glass dome over it all. The candle had soon used up all the vital air in the confined space and gone out, leaving the card and Byron’s hair in an atmosphere similar to the primeval Earth’s.

And at some time during the last day or so — he did glance at the bell jar pretty regularly! — the strand of Byron’s hair had contracted, pulling the card over onto its face.

Byron had been bitten by Doctor Polidori in 1822, in Italy. Trelawny reckoned that the hair was a link to Polidori, a tripwire … and it seemed that the Rossettis’ uncle had recently tripped it, in spite of the assurances of Christina and Maria that their uncle had been banished for good. Inefficient women!

If Polidori was up and active again, then Polidori and Miss B., wherever she was these days, could resume their seven-year-interrupted effort to bring another earthquake to London. And it would be partly Trelawny’s fault, he having invited Miss B. back into the world.

On the other hand, it could be that human hair just naturally shrank over the years. He had to make sure.

Long ago he had told the Rossetti sisters about the woman who lived in this house, over the dolly shop.

If she was still alive, if she still lived here, she would surely be approached by Polidori, if in fact he was resurrected.

By touch he established where the corners of the landing were. He was directly in front of her door.

He took a deep breath and knocked.

“Go away,” came a woman’s languorous voice from within.

Trelawny smiled in the darkness. “You’ve invited worse things in, Gretchen.”

“My God, Trelawny? You must be a hundred years old. Go away, I’ve got company.”

Trelawny tried the doorknob — it turned, but the door rattled against an interior bolt.

“Let me in, Gretchen,” he said.

“Write me a letter,” came her muffled reply.

Trelawny stepped back and drew the revolver from under his waistcoat, then lifted a boot and kicked the door near the knob. Wood cracked and the door flew inward and banged against some article of furniture.

Trelawny’s nostrils flared at a mingled scent of roses and clay as he took two quick steps across the wooden floor inside, spinning to scan the whole room over the sight bead at the end of the gun’s barrel.

By the dim glow of a red-shaded lamp he saw two figures reclining on a sofa by an open window on the street side of the long room. One was a woman in a filmy gown, and the other — Trelawny felt his heart begin thumping in his chest — was a pale man with curly hair and blood gleaming on his lips and chin under a disordered mustache.

The man wore a tight-fitting black coat and trousers, ragged at the hems and torn at the elbows and knees, but it was difficult in the faint light to be sure how big or far away he was. Trelawny was careful not to look into the man’s eyes.

Trelawny swung the barrel to point at the man’s chest, but the woman had stood up and blocked the shot.

“Will you kill me, Edward?” she asked, nearly laughing.

“Yes,” he said. “It’ll go through you to him.” But he couldn’t clearly see the figure of the man now, and Trelawny knew he had lost what he sometimes called the elephant of surprise. He blinked away sudden sweat.

The man behind the standing woman seemed to flail long arms, as if trying to stand up, or fly. “Who is it?” he said in a shrill voice like a drill bit twisting in green wood. “I see steel. I smell silver.”

The pistol grip was suddenly very hot in Trelawny’s right palm; but he held it more tightly and aimed it at a point below the woman’s ribs that seemed to cover the broadest part of what might be the man’s chest—

But in the moment when he pulled the trigger, the barrel was jerked upward, and the gun fired into the ceiling.

Momentarily deafened by the confined explosion and blinded by the lateral flares from the gap between the barrel and the cylinder, Trelawny leaped back into the doorway; he managed to juggle the hot gun in his nearly sprained hand and not drop it, but his retinas were hopelessly dazzled by the after-glare.

Over the ringing in his ears he heard the man’s creaking voice cry, “It is the bridge man!”

Trelawny swung the gun barrel toward the voice, but a clatter at the window and the rippling, receding flutter of wind in cloth told him he was too late — the creature had flown away out the window, having probably abandoned its vulnerable human form even before the gun had gone off.

Trelawny had been holding his breath and now exhaled, feeling every day of his seventy-seven years, and he realized that he had been strongly hoping that it had been some natural effect that had knocked over the card in the Byron bell jar.

The woman had moved up between Trelawny and the lamp, and he could see well enough to make out her slim form against the glow. He almost thought he could see the lines of her bones through her translucent pink flesh. She shook her head angrily, then stepped past him into the hall.

“Nothing, nothing!” she shouted. “Back to your holes, idiots!”

She shoved Trelawny aside as she came back in, and he had no trouble hearing her slam the door.

“Why didn’t he kill you?” she demanded furiously.

“He doesn’t dare,” said Trelawny, still blinking toward the window. He walked around the couch to it and leaned out over the sill, looking first up into the night sky and then down among the shadows of the street, but he saw no motion at all, and all he could hear over the ringing in his ears was the muted crowd noise from the New Cut Market a street away.

He pulled the window closed and latched it, then turned back toward the room.

Gretchen was sitting at a table near the lamp, and she pointed at a chair on the other side. Trelawny crossed the room and cautiously lowered himself into the chair, still holding the pistol in his burned hand but pointing it now at the floor. He peered at her and saw fresh blood gleaming on her bare throat. In the red light the blood looked black.

“Damn you, Edward,” she said, touching the blood and looking at her finger. “He might not be back now for a week, and he needs me now.”

Trelawny laid the gun down on the table at last. “Do you have cold water?”

Gretchen scowled at him, but she got up and lifted a basin from a table near the bed and shuffled back to set it heavily in front of him. It was half full of rocking water, and he gratefully sank his hand into its coolness.

“That lad must be new,” he remarked, wincing as he flexed his fingers. “He looked like a black chicken.”

She was clearly affronted. “Lad? A chicken? There hasn’t been time for any to die and come back. That was my very own—” She waved her hand.

“That was Polidori himself?”

“He’s been broken for seven years. He’s only just back — and he’s ill.”

Trelawny touched his neck and nodded toward her. “But you’re helping to restore him to his old stature.”

“I do what I can for him,” she agreed, nodding. “He loves me.”

Trelawny drummed the fingers of his free hand on the table. He sighed. “No use offering you garlic, or the pistol.”

“Give me the pistol and I’ll shoot you with it.” She stretched sleepily. “What do you mean, he doesn’t dare kill you?”

“You heard him say it. I’m the bridge man.” He touched his neck again. “If this flesh dies, the bridge between our two species dies. So he wouldn’t thank you for shooting me.”

Her eyes were half shut, and she cocked an eyebrow. “Really. Edward John Trelawny is the mixer.”

“The catalyst.” He smiled wearily and got to his feet. “I’m it.”

“Well then, you take good care of yourself, Edward,” she said, “and I think a visit every seven years is too frequent for our acquaintance — I’d be grateful if you’d simply forget the way to this house.”

“Gladly.” Trelawny picked up the pistol, and it had cooled enough for him to gingerly tuck it back into his trousers.

He opened the door, walked out to the landing, and began descending the stairs. I won’t be able to do anything with Polidori, he thought, at least not here — but I might have another go at Miss B. — I believe I know a close friend of hers.

CHAPTER THREE

THE LOG IN the fireplace collapsed in a swirl of sparks at the same moment that the knock sounded at the door, and John Crawford wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it, in the same way that he sometimes imagined voices in the splashing sound of a tub filling, or footsteps in the clatter of leaves blowing across empty pavements.

But he put down his glass and stood up unsteadily and weaved his way to the hallway and the street door.

He pulled his dressing gown more tightly across his shoulders before unlatching the door and pulling it open, and he winced when the chilly night air swept inside — but there was no one on the doorstep.

He pushed his lanky hair out of his eyes and peered up and down the street, but he could make out no distinct figures in the close-pressing shadows of Wych Street.

He was about to close the door again when he looked down and saw a rounded metal disk on the top step, and he bent carefully to pick it up.

It was a gold watch, and it was warm.

The watch had been holding down a scrap of paper, and he managed to slap his palm onto it before it could blow away; holding the watch and the paper, he straightened and stepped back into the house and closed the door.

He shuffled back to his chair and picked up his reading glasses from the table beside it — and his chest went cold when he fitted them on and looked more closely at the watch.

It was his own watch, one that he had lost. He pried up the back cover and looked at the engraving on the inside of the cover: John Crawford, 7 Wych Street, February 12, 1862.

But, he thought, I smashed this watch against a wall in the sewers seven years ago, to repel the ghosts of my wife and son! He looked hopefully back toward the entry hall — could they have put it together again somehow, and brought it back? Were they even now outside, waiting?

But no — I bought another watch a few days later, and had this engraving done in it. Yes, that was February of ’62. What became of it?

As if it were a belated effect of the cold air he had inhaled at the door, memory blew the alcohol fumes and maudlin fantasies out of his mind.

He had dropped it in the tunnels below Highgate Cemetery to gauge the depth of the well he and Adelaide McKee had climbed down.

And he remembered a little girl’s voice calling from the darkness below them: I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.

It had been McKee’s daughter — his daughter — Johanna; and later he had seen her cradled in the inhuman arms of John Polidori, swinging this watch by its chain.

He laid the watch down on the table and quickly spread the scrap of paper out flat beside it.

Scrawled on it, in awkwardly penciled letters, were the words HELP ME JOHANNA.

Crawford’s face was suddenly cold.

Perhaps she had not died in that cave-in.

But — the last time he had seen Johanna, she had been with the Rossettis’ monstrous uncle, Polidori; and pretty clearly she had been bitten by him. Christina Rossetti’s trick that day, whatever it had been, had apparently killed Polidori, but would it have freed Johanna?

All the warnings his parents had given him, and which Adelaide McKee had reinforced, about carelessly inviting entities into his house, flooded back into his mind now. He should run upstairs and fetch his neglected old garlic jar — he was pretty sure he knew where it was — and smear the stuff around the door and window frames, and then go to bed with the obliterating whisky bottle.

But he had run away from Girard, nine years ago … and Johanna had written “help me.”

Sweat dripped onto the note.

How long had it been since he had taken the watch and note inside and shut the door? Would she leave? He took a deep breath and let it out, and then he strode quickly back to the front door and pulled it open, and he had scuffed down the steps to the pavement before noticing that he was wearing his slippers.

But he peered up and down the street, puffing steam in the cold air and straining to see into the shadows below the overhanging upper floors of the old houses.

“Johanna?” he called.

There was no reply, and he couldn’t see anything in the deep shadows all around.

The cold breeze corkscrewing down the narrow street got up his pants legs and into his collar, and he was about to run back inside for at least a coat and boots, when at last he saw movement on the far side of the street, in the recessed doorway of a house to his left.

He forced his eyes to focus — it was a small person, he could see that much — and then the figure stepped forward, and by the light that slanted down from the Strand he saw that it was a young person with long hair trailing from under a hat.

“Johanna!” he called again, starting forward across the crushed gravel of the street, but she stepped back into the shadows and he lost sight of her.

“Damn it,” Crawford muttered, shivering. “Come in,” he said loudly. “I’ll help you!”

“Shut up!” yelled someone from a window overhead.

Oh, for—“I’ll leave the door unlocked!” Crawford called, and then hurried back into the house.

He even left the door an inch ajar as he hurried up the stairs to find boots and a coat and a scarf, in case he might have to go out to talk to her — but when he got back downstairs, carrying his outdoor gear, the front door was shut, and he heard the couch creak in the parlor.

He froze in the hall. What had he just invited into his house — thoughtlessly invited into his house?

Trembling, remembering the creatures he had seen on Waterloo Bridge and at Carpace’s salon and under Highgate Cemetery, he laid the coat and boots on the floor and then peeked fearfully around the doorway jamb into the parlor.

But the young girl sitting on the couch did not seem to be any sort of vampire. Her face, framed by a slouch hat and disordered locks of brown hair and the pushed-up collar of an oversized wool coat, was pink with the evening’s chill, and her bright blue eyes held only cautious curiosity. One of his distressed cats, a Manx with only one eye, was sitting on her lap, audibly purring.

“I’m pure human,” she said in a light voice. “But you shouldn’t ask things in so quick. But — I’m glad you did tonight.”

“You’re… Johanna.”

“You look older, your beard is gray. Yes, I’m Johanna. I do too, I’m sure — people say I’m probably fourteen now.” She yawned. “You said that time that you’re my father.”

She really did seem to be fully and only human. He let his legs and shoulders relax. “Yes. And your mother said you were born in March of ’56, so you’re…”

“Thirteen.” She shrugged, then looked directly at him. “Is my mother still alive?”

“She was when I last saw her,” he said. “That was on that day we saw you.” He felt his face reddening. “You, uh, didn’t die when that tunnel collapsed.”

“No,” she agreed. “I crawled up a side tunnel before it all fell in.”

“I’m sorry — we assumed—”

She shrugged again, apparently with no resentment.

After a few moments of silence in which his breathing and heartbeat slowed to their normal paces, he sighed and asked, “Are you hungry?”

She nodded solemnly.

There were no servants in the house; Mrs. Middleditch had died peacefully in her attic room three years ago, and since then Crawford had got by with a maidservant and a charwoman, both of whom came in three times a week.

“You can bring the cat into the dining room,” he said, pushing open the door on the far side of the room from the curtained windows. He looked back — the cat had jumped away, and the girl paused to pick up the watch and thrust it inside her coat.

In the narrow dining room, he turned up the gas jets and waved her toward a chair at the table, but she came tapping after him in her narrow boots to the stairs that led down to the kitchen and scullery.

He paused at the stairway door. “I’ll bring some things up.”

“I’ll come along down.” She reached into her voluminous coat and pulled up the grip of a knife, then slid it back, apparently into a concealed sheath. “Cold iron,” she said. “And I’ve got garlic too. I don’t smell any of that in this house.”

“It’s been seven years since I’ve needed it,” he told her. Then, after looking directly into her eyes, he laughed in surprise and added, “I’m—how did you put it? — pure human!”

She peered at his face, then nodded. “I suppose you are.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wait up here?”

“No.”

“Very well. You can bring those things along if you like, but I’d advise leaving your coat and hat up here.”

She nodded and shrugged out of the coat — under it she was wearing shiny brown corduroy trousers and at least two plaid flannel shirts — and threw it and her hat into a corner. The sheathed knife was on a leather strap around her neck, and she tucked it into the shirts.

He led the way down the stairs, each step of which was more damp than the one above it.

The steamy kitchen was a tiny dark room with three soot-blackened windows just under the low, beamed ceiling, and when Crawford struck a match to the kerosene lamp over the stove, he winced at the look and smell of the place.

The boiler over the stove gurgled like a colicky cow’s stomach. Shirts and stockings, still visibly damp two days after washing, hung from a clotheshorse attached to one of the ceiling beams, and he had to duck around them to step to the larder. He tried to carry the lamp so that his small guest would not see through the doorway on the left, into the scullery, where he saw dirty dishes still piled in the sink over the wet stone floor.

But she seemed unconcerned by the squalor. “Ham!” she said. “And onions! And cheese! Have you got mustard?”

“Back upstairs.”

“We can do without. Better we talk underground.”

“The last time we talked, it was underground.”

Johanna had reached up to the larder shelf and hoisted down the platter of ham, and she carried it carefully to the narrow servants’ table by the oven and clanked it down.

“Dirt’s an extra roof,” she said, going back for the cheese. “Hides him from the sun, hides us from him.”

Crawford frowned. “‘Hides’? But he’s dead … surely.” He found a knife in the scullery and wiped it on his shirt, then tugged an onion free from a braid of them and joined her at the table. He set the lamp down beside the platter.

“I thought so too,” she said. Her tone was light, but she had pulled her knife out to cut the ham, and he saw the blade shaking. “But he — visited me! — this evening.”

“Good God!”

She darted a glance at him and might have briefly attempted a smile. “He’s thin now, his clothes are black paper, and he smells like mud. He’s got to start over, and he wanted to bite me again, get me in his boat again. I ran away from him.” She twitched the knife blade. “I already had this, but I got some garlic quick.”

Belatedly it occurred to him to wonder how she had been living during these past years. “Stay here. You’re safe here.”

“Here! He’s on to you too. He fancied your mother but got jilted by her, he said — my grandmother! — in the long ago, in Italy. And he can always find me.” Her voice broke at last as she added, “He says by his reckoning I’m his d-daughter.”

“You’re my daughter,” Crawford said, with more feeling than he had anticipated. “And I’ll protect you from him.”

“However much you can. But thanks.” She sniffed and scowled and brushed her sleeve across her eyes, and then went on almost briskly, “Was your mother’s name Josephine?”

“Yes. How did you—?”

“He used to call me that, sometimes. How did you see him, that day under the cemetery?”

Crawford blinked. “See him?”

“Where did it look like you saw him? In the old tower full of rolled-up books? On the glass seashore? In the big skull? In the hanging boat? Among the giant wheels?”

“The skull,” said Crawford. “You were there — you didn’t see the interior of an enormous skull?”

“I only saw a dark tunnel and an underground river with a broken bridge over it. The skull means he’s worried. Was. With good reason, as it turned out.” She had cut several ragged pieces of ham free of the bone, and now wiped the knife on her sleeve and sat down in one of the two wooden chairs.

“I don’t,” she said quietly, “want him to get me again. You killed him then, and he stayed dead for seven years. Can you do it again?”

“It wasn’t me that did it then.” Crawford crouched to draw two mugs of beer from the cask by the coal scuttle, and he set them on the table and then sat down and began slicing the onion. The smells of ham and beer and onions made him realize that he was hungry, and he wondered where there might be clean plates. “But I know the woman who did it. We can tell her it needs doing again.”

“I hope she’s still alive.”

Crawford wrapped a strip of ham around a lump of cheese and some rings of onion and took a bite of it. It tasted wonderful.

“She is,” he said as he chewed. “She’s a poet, and she’s been publishing things steadily.” He wondered if Christina Rossetti would still remember him, and he was embarrassed to think that she might.

“A poet?” said his daughter. “I hope her poems haven’t suddenly got better.”

Crawford remembered Trelawny saying, that day in the cage in Regent’s Park, that writing good poetry was “one of their gifts.”

“She gets bad reviews,” he said hopefully.

On the black brick wall above the doorway to the stairs, a bell rang, loud in the narrow kitchen; both Crawford and the girl jumped.

He had installed an electric doorbell a few years ago. “I believe that means there’s someone at the front door,” he said.

“Stay down here! You locked the door?”

“Yes.”

Crawford had half stood up, and now he sank back into the chair and picked up his beer mug in a trembling hand.

The bell rang again.

He took a long swallow of the lukewarm beer and set the mug down — but a moment later he whispered a curse and stood up. He lifted his chair and carefully walked across the flagstones to the street-side wall, and he set the chair down slowly below one of the ceiling-abutting windows and stepped up onto it.

The window glass was black, and he could see nothing outside.

The bell rang a third time, and then faintly, through the glass in front of his face more than from down the kitchen stairway behind him, he heard the door knocker rapping.

He glanced back at Johanna; she had stood up and was pressing a finger to her lips.

The rapping sounded again, louder, and after thirty seconds he heard boots descending the housefront steps.

The boots clinked against the stone.

The breath stopped in his throat and he glanced over his shoulder at the stairway and calculated how long it would take him to rush up the stairs and down the hall to the front door — too long, perhaps.

So he hopped to the floor, dived to the table and snatched up his beer mug and flung it as hard as he could at the high narrow window.

Even as the broken glass was clattering across the bricks of the area outside and the steamy kitchen air was roiled by the sudden chilly draft, he was on the chair again and calling through the broken pane,

“Adelaide!”

The clinking footsteps halted, then rang down the iron stairs from street level to the bricks of the area, and a moment later Adelaide McKee’s remembered face was peering in at him, dimly lit by the lamp on the stove behind him. She must have been practically lying down on the pavement out there.

“John!” she said breathlessly. “Open the damned door and stop breaking your windows!”

She looked past him then, and her eyes widened in astonishment. She tried to speak, then just bit her lip and gave him an urgently questioning look.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s our daughter.”

Crawford looked over his shoulder at Johanna, who was standing by the stairs with her knife drawn.

“Johanna,” he said, “it’s your mother! She’s fully and only human — aren’t you, Adelaide? — run upstairs and open the door!”

He turned back to face McKee, and he thrust one hand through the broken window to clutch at her gloved fingers.

“You can’t open your door yourself?” she said, squeezing his hand. Tears glinted on her cheek in the lamplight.

“I—” It hadn’t occurred to him. “I don’t want to let you out of my sight.”

The cold night air clearly carried the snap of the door bolt retracting, and McKee glanced upward.

She released his hand and got to her feet, and now he could see only her boots, with the familiar metal pattens strapped to the soles. He heard her say, “I can’t stay long.”

FIFTEEN SECONDS LATER JOHANNA and McKee were seated at the table, and Crawford was dragging up the cask of beer to sit on.

By Crawford’s calculation, McKee was thirty-four now, but she looked as young as Johanna as she gazed wide-eyed at her daughter’s face by the now-flickering glare of the lamp.

“You—” McKee said to her, “we — we thought you were killed — I never should have—”

Johanna nodded. She seemed only interested, not upset. “He got killed, that day. It was a good day. But now he’s alive again.”

“You know?” McKee turned to Crawford. “That’s why I came here tonight, to tell you, warn you. The songbirds are in a state. Chichuwee says all the ghosts are jabbering about it and fleeing straight to the river and out to sea. Sister Christina’s trick has worn off, or broken, and he’ll know us, you and me.”

She looked back at Johanna. “And you. How long have you been living here? How did you know he’s back up?”

Johanna gave her an uncomfortable smile. “If I’m living here, it’s only been for about half an hour — Mr. Crawford’s name and address were in his watch.” She pulled the watch out of one of her shirt pockets and laid it on the table. “And I’ve known that he’s back for … about two hours. He came straight to me, but I got away from him, dove into a mountain of shoes and he couldn’t follow me among the million old footprints. He’s lost all his suppliers, and he can’t see very well.”

McKee turned a blank gaze from one of them to the other. Then to Johanna she said, “You’ve had the watch all this time? — seven years! — and you only came to your father tonight?”

“I couldn’t read, for a long time. And up to now everything’s been good enough.”

“What have you—” McKee waved a hand. “Where have you been living?”

Johanna puffed her cheeks and blew out a breath. “Lately in a room off Petticoat Lane, by the Old Clothes Exchange; I sometimes pick up porter work, baling up leather trousers and wigs for Ireland, and old rugs for Holland… I’ve been sharing a room with two women, and when I can’t make my share of the nine-pence week’s rent, I sometimes bring home some rug pieces for the floor, so when we drop something it doesn’t go straight through the cracks to the donkey stable below. But before that … a rooftop shed against a chimney, for a while, right after he went away; I was a beggar then, without even deciding to be … then on a boat by Southwark Bridge, working for the Mud Lark man… I lived with a coster family for a couple of years, I think, selling apples on the streets.”

“You live here now,” said Crawford firmly. After a second or two, he made himself look at McKee. “Our daughter is not dead.” His voice was steady. “Do you remember what I said — the last thing I said to you — in that village, Lower Clapton?”

McKee sat back in her chair, and after glancing around at the narrow kitchen, she looked squarely at him.

From her ragged handbag Crawford heard the mutter of a songbird.

“I’m — where do I start?” she said in a flat voice. “After that day under Highgate Cemetery, I went back to Sudbury, since I’d no longer be bringing a devil’s murderous attention with me. But it turned out my parents were dead by that time, and I thought Johanna was too. I came back to London.”

But not to me, thought Crawford. With a chilly, sinking feeling in his stomach he remembered her saying, a few minutes ago, I can’t stay long.

“What,” he began, but his voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat. “What does he do?”

McKee’s stare was defiant. “He’s a dealer in metal spoons.”

Johanna caught Crawford’s eye and then glanced meaningfully at McKee’s brown coat and faded blue dress, and he gathered that the garments didn’t look top class in the girl’s professional appraisal.

Crawford met McKee’s gaze and nodded gently. “You said there was nothing for you to hope for, anymore, in London.”

“Nor anywhere else, I discovered.” She shrugged. “And I knew the ins and outs of London already.”

Crawford remembered her despair, at their last meeting, and he suspected that she had taken up with this spoons seller out of that despair, out of that self-disgust.

He sighed, emptying his lungs. “How long can you stay?”

“I don’t — not long, he gets jealous, and I don’t want him spending any money on — but Johanna!” She threw Crawford an uncharacteristically helpless look. “Can she live here?”

“We’ll need garlic and mirrors aplenty,” said Johanna. “And soon.”

“Yes, of course she can stay here,” said Crawford.

McKee nodded. “Does that watch work?” she asked Johanna.

“No. And it’s been in the river a few times.”

McKee glanced at Crawford and then away, and he remembered her saying, I owe you a lot of time. A debt to be written off, he thought.

“God knows what time it is,” she said, and got to her feet. She looked yearningly at Johanna and said, “I’ll be back soon.”

“Tomorrow?” said Johanna with some eagerness. “Morning?”

McKee smiled. “Yes. I promise.”

“Bring some mirrors and garlic, and some of your old man’s spoons, if they’re silver. I’m not going to dare sleep a wink tonight, with just these.” She patted her shirt and pants pocket, indicating the knife and, presumably, some garlic.

McKee nodded, tight-lipped. “He sleeps late. I’ll tell him he sold the spoons and spent the money on rum,” she said. She glanced again at the inert watch. “Unless he’s already done that by now.”

“Never mind,” said Crawford hastily, “I’ve got crowns and shillings — plenty of silver.”

“I knew somebody did,” said McKee. She took a cloth-wrapped bundle from her handbag and set it on the table; from inside it Crawford heard a muffled cheeping. “Take that now. A goldfinch — if he really yipes, duck and get your garlic ready.” She started to say something more, but exhaled and turned away. Finally she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Then she was gone, tapping rapidly up the stairs. A few moments later Crawford and Johanna heard the front door close, and, through the broken window, McKee’s metallic footsteps receding.

Johanna was swinging her feet under her chair. “The last thing you said to her, before, was asking her to marry you?”

Crawford stared at her and managed to smile. “Yes.”

“That’s a man’s coat she’s got on, much mended, and the boots don’t match.” She rolled some cheese and onion in a piece of ham as Crawford had done and bit off half of it.

Crawford got up, found another mug, and filled it with beer. As he sat down, he said, “I can show you to your room after we’re done with this … supper. I’ve got probably half a dozen mirrors around the house, and you can have them.”

She nodded, chewing. “And,” she said finally, “after he bites you, he’ll know about the mirrors and not look at them. No, we neither of us should sleep tonight, especially with a window broken. Fetch the mirrors down here and we can make a wall of ’em. And bring your shillings! We’ve got knives, and—” she added as she dug a jar out of her trouser pocket, “here’s garlic.”

“Stay down here all night?”

“Why not? It’s partly underground.” She grinned. “We can tell stories till dawn. What happened to your cats? I saw another one in the hall, and it only had three legs.”

He stared at her for several seconds, then shrugged. “I’m a — an animal doctor,” he said. “When I find hurt cats, I bring them home and take care of them.” He took a sip of beer and then began cutting up more ham and onion. “I’ve got a blind one too, and she knows every corner of the rooms and furniture; she can run from one end of the house to the other and not bump into anything.”

Johanna nodded. “She should have married you. My mother should have.”

“Not the cat,” Crawford agreed. The thought of his poor cats had reminded him of something. “Uh … have you been — by any chance — baptized? — since we saw you last?”

Johanna had taken another bite of the rolled ham, and she nodded as she chewed. “The Mud Lark man has all the Larks baptized before they can scout for him.”

Crawford wondered who this Mud Lark man might be, and what sort of scouting he had his young charges do; but there was all night in which to ask.

“Good, good.” He got to his feet. “I’ll fetch the mirrors and silver — don’t eat all this before I get back.”

CHAPTER FOUR

IN HIS DRAWING room in Upper Brook Street, Algernon Swinburne stood staring out through the open windows at the still-dark houses in the stale night. He had come home hours ago, but he was still dressed in the flannel trousers, white shirt, and woolen sweater that he had worn on his latest visit to the Verbena Lodge in Circus Road, when the evening had been fresh and full of anticipation.

Ordinarily he would have indulged himself now in the opportunity for mild pain by sitting and leaning back in a chair, but this evening’s drunken excesses at Verbena Lodge had left him slightly — only slightly, and certainly only temporarily — disgusted with the formal pretenses he engaged in there. None of the whippings and spankings that went on ever caused any actual injury, or even any real hurt.

He turned his back on the window. By the light of two gas jets on the far wall, for the fire had gone out while he’d been gone and he hadn’t the energy to fetch more coal, he surveyed the room’s ornate furnishings — the rosewood chairs, the imported Herter Brothers sofa, the gold-stamped book spines vertical and horizontal on the shelves — finally noting, hung on the walls above the bookshelves, the token whips and birch rods; and even, for the bravura of it, a pair of crossed rapiers over the mantelpiece.

Sad evidences, those were, of his gallingly restrained inclinations, which were unlikely to be really indulged while he still lived.

He sighed. The only satisfactory thing about it all, he thought — as he faced the window again and peered out at the dark patch that was Grosvenor Square and listened to the whir of a distant cab out in the night — is that my vigilant Miss B. cannot mistake the activities at the Verbena Lodge for anything having to do with love.

Girls in staged schoolrooms being struck with birch rods on their behinds by women pretending to be strict governesses — other girls taking money to spank patrons like Swinburne who took the roles of boys needing punishment — none of it would engage Miss B.’s inhuman attention, rouse in her that response which was comparable to homicidal jealousy in humans, and the spankings Swinburne received were far too mild for her to perceive them as attacks on him. The girls at the lodge were safe. Swinburne certainly didn’t love any of them, nor did they love him.

He hadn’t loved any woman since Lizzie, and she — her ghost, at any rate — had refused his offer to let her inhabit his living body. Since her refusal he had surrendered himself to the strenuous and enervating affection of Miss B., and, on the side, the largely symbolic Sadean activities at the Verbena Lodge.

He didn’t dare love anybody, nor even seem to. He had loved his sister Edith, and she had died only a year after he had committed himself to Miss B., and immediately afterward he had persuaded his parents to take an extended Continental tour; since then he had avoided them, and so they were still alive. And when Gabriel Rossetti had arranged for Swinburne to take a mistress in the conventional way, the woman died less than a year later, in spite of precautions Swinburne had thought would be adequate; he hadn’t loved her — she had complained that “spanking was no help” in making love — but even his unsatisfactory behavior with her had effectively mimicked it, to the woman’s fatal misfortune.

Miss B. will have no rivals, Swinburne thought now as he stepped to the sideboard and poured one last inch of brandy into a snifter — though he knew that it was a mistake to attribute human motivations to her kind. She was more like a sun that ignited a reciprocally fueled solar fire in him, while simply incinerating any lesser planets that presumed to orbit him. Then felt I like some watcher of the tombs, he thought, paraphrasing Keats, when a new planet swims into my ken.

Mentally he recited a verse of his own: Though the many lights dwindle to one light, / There is help if the heavens has one.

Do I love that one light, he wondered, do I love her? I’m awed, by the ancient alien majesty of her kind, certainly; baffled by the nonhuman mathematics of her logic — but I certainly do love her gift: my gift is single, my verses…

He set down his glass, the brandy untasted, and shivered in the draft from the open window.

His first book, Atalanta in Calydon, had been published in 1865, three years after Lizzie’s funeral — and the long verse play, a vivid retelling of the pagan Atalanta myth from Apollodorus and Homer, had won praise from the Edinburgh Review and the Saturday Review.

His next collection of verse, though, Poems and Ballads, which had been published the following year, was savaged by the critics; and their denunciations of the vicious sensuality of the poems was so widespread and harsh that an obscenity indictment from the attorney general seemed likely, and the publisher withdrew the book only a month after its publication. But a bolder publisher picked it up before the year’s end, and by then the book had found passionate admirers among the young men at Oxford and Cambridge, and a few critics hesitantly began to concede that Swinburne’s poems, for all their pagan and even anti-Christian excesses, held a power not seen in English literature since Shelley and Byron and Keats.

Naturally, thought Swinburne now. I share the same species of Muse that those poets had. The attentions of the antediluvian stony tribe kill those we love and make us suffer in sunlight, but, in a side effect that they may not even be aware of, awaken language in us, make of it a living beast that can be harnessed and ridden.

Christina had it, for a while, though in recent years she writes religious stories instead of her old clear-eyed poems about death, and ghosts in the sea, and seductive goblins.

But she might have it again now — now that her uncle has apparently been freed from the disruptive mirrors that she put into Lizzie’s coffin.

Swinburne recalled the conversation he had overheard at Tudor House six or seven hours ago, which had sent him hurrying to the Verbena Lodge so that his thoughts might not dwell too much on it and draw Miss B.’s attention: Christina’s uncle’s living and conscious identity was concentrated in a little statue stuck in her dead father’s throat! — and the identity had been somehow scrambled and made impotent seven years ago, but was awake again now — though wounded.

Something to remember.

He looked up suddenly — he had clearly heard the street door downstairs, which he knew he had locked, open and then close.

TRELAWNY HAD WALKED NORTH from Pelham Crescent to Upper Brook Street, skirting the shadowed expanse of Hyde Park where Shelley’s first wife had been drowned in the Serpentine, and peering around from under the brim of his old hat at the dark houses that stood on either side like closely ranked tombstones, the dimly seen windows and balconies making hieroglyphic epitaphs. Here and there a light shone like a firefly in some room, and he wondered if lone, fevered poets labored in those rooms over unmerited verses. The costermongers would be assembling by the river now, with their carts of fish and vegetables agleam in the dockside lamplight, but none of them would have begun to venture north yet. There was no one abroad to see his quickly striding figure, and in any case the paper-wrapped parcel he carried looked like a plain shoe box.

Lights were on in an upstairs room in Swinburne’s house, and the windows were open; but the young poet had been at his filthy Verbena Lodge until after midnight, and he had probably forgotten the lights and the window and was soddenly asleep by now.

Trelawny tapped nimbly up the steps to the front door, and on the lamplit stage of the threshold he flourished his lock pick as confidently as if it had been the key. A moment’s one-handed twisting of it had the bolt retracted, and the old man opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him. The hall was dark, but he could make out the shape of the carpeted stairs, and he took them silently, two at a time.

At the top of the stairs he paused to strip the paper from the box he had prepared, and he swung back the hinged lid, taking care to make no noise — but when he stepped into the brightly lit drawing room, he saw Swinburne standing, fully dressed, by the fireplace; and he had evidently heard Trelawny’s entry, for he was even holding a sword.

The young poet raised it in a fair en garde. “Get out of this house at once,” he said in his shrill voice, “or I’ll kill you.”

Trelawny grinned. “Or whip me, eh? Unless that’s just for the girls at the Verbena Lodge.”

Swinburne looked disconcerted and lowered the blade an inch. His thatch of orange hair made his head look like an unhealthy overgrown flower on a frail stalk.

He peered more closely at Trelawny. “I know you.”

“Of course you do. We’ve been to church together, you and I.”

Swinburne frowned, started to say something, then just muttered, “You call the salons churches?”

“I mean the time we met in the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s.”

“Oh!” He lowered the blade a few more inches. “But — what are you doing here? You advised me then to — quit England, sever my connection with…”

“Which I perceive you haven’t done.”

Swinburne’s left hand flew to his throat and pulled up his collar.

“No, lad, I’ve only observed the marks in your verse — and they’re more plain there than any punctures in your scrawny neck.”

Swinburne colored. “Did she … send you here?” The young man seemed frightened.

“No. And are you jealous? Don’t be — I don’t write poetry; my relationship with her has never been”—he paused to touch his own throat—“consummated.”

Swinburne stepped away from the fireplace and sat down in a chair by the open window. The sword, still in his hand, had dragged a furrow in the nap of the carpet. “What do you want then? Go away.”

“I had hoped to take what I want while you slept; if you’d only been drunk enough, it might not even have wakened you.” Trelawny shrugged. “I want just a bit of your blood. A few drops, merely.”

Swinburne’s scanty orange eyebrows were halfway up his high forehead. “No! Get out of here.”

Trelawny rocked back and forth on his heels. “Allowing for difficulty,” he said, “I obtained detailed statements from two of the girls at your lodge. Many would find the accounts shocking and disgusting, but I think most would find them — well, shocking and disgusting, yes, but laughable too. And pitiable. There are houses that would publish these things. Your own publisher, Hotten, would probably do it — he’d extend you the courtesy of changing the names, but everyone would know who the subject is.”

After a few heartbeats, “You’d see to that, I suppose,” said Swinburne sourly.

Trelawny shrugged.

Swinburne shook his head as if to clear it. “Blood? What do you want my blood for?”

“To kill flies, to scare children, to keep Christians away from my door, what do you care? Just a couple of drops, no more than what you’d lose if you try to shave this morning.”

Swinburne made a fist of his free hand to hide its shaking.

“Blood,” he said, as if to remind himself of the subject at hand. “And you’ll give me these statements you got from the girls? In exchange? And not get more?”

“That’s it.”

Swinburne sat back, brooding. “She might not like it. My blood is hers.”

“You know I’m an ally of hers. She could hardly blame you.”

“If she blames a person for a thing, there’s no help in him being justified.”

Trelawny exhaled. “Damn it, little man, if Shelley’d been as lily-livered as you are, he’d never have … just go and shave the lint off your chin and then look the other way while I steal the towel afterward!”

Swinburne shook his head. “Go home. This is insane.”

“Humor an old lunatic.”

“What do you want it for?”

“Ahhh…” Trelawny tried to think of something plausible. “Well, if you must know, rejuvenation.” He tried to look mildly shamefaced. “I’ve reason to believe that a few drops of your sort of blood, in brandy in an amethyst cup, might restore me to—”

“Semi-decrepitude.”

Cheeky bugger, thought Trelawny. “If you like.”

“You’re as bad as the supplicants under London Bridge.”

Trelawny just stared at him from under his bushy white eyebrows. The mix of vampire-tainted blood with brandy in an amethyst cup was indeed a drink sought after by certain perverse folk, and Trelawny had heard of a sort of club called the Galatea under London Bridge, where such people gathered.

Swinburne shifted in his chair. “You’ll leave immediately afterward?”

“I’ll be away down the street before you’ve heard the door close.”

Swinburne stared at him, then shrugged and got to his feet, the sword still trailing from his right hand — and then his nervous gaze fell on the box Trelawny still carried.

“What’s that?”

“A box. For cigars. If you have any, I’ll put them in it.”

But Swinburne’s eyes were suddenly wide. “That lid! — is a mirror, on the inside!” He stepped back hastily and raised the rapier again as the gaslight threw his shadow across the whips hung on the walls. “Get out! I know what mirrors can do to her sort — you’ll not deprive me of my poetry! Get out, I say!”

Trelawny set the box on the mantel, then spread his hands placatingly and stepped forward, but Swinburne wasn’t letting the old man get near him — Swinburne’s sword snapped forward, and Trelawny yanked his right hand back just in time to avoid losing a finger.

The old man sighed and shuffled backward to the fireplace, and he reached up to pull the other rapier free of its hook. He suppressed a wince as his scorched palm closed firmly on the grip.

“I’m sorry you know it,” he said, exhaling.

Swinburne laughed in surprise. “You’d fight me? I’m not yet near forty, and you must be twice that — and you should know that I’ve studied fencing.”

“I must be a fool,” Trelawny agreed. And I’m only seventy-seven, he thought. He raised the sword, holding the grip as he would hold a hammer.

Swinburne relaxed again into the en garde position, and his disengage and thrust at Trelawny’s wrist was contained and fast.

Trelawny parried it with a deliberately clumsy swat that rang the blades, and he retreated a step, his rear heel knocking on the hearth bricks; he didn’t want the young man to experience any mortal alarm that might call up Miss B. prematurely.

“Hah!” exclaimed Swinburne. “You fence like a man trying to hang wallpaper!”

That was in fact the impression Trelawny wanted to give. Blisters on his palm were broken now, and the sword grip was wet.

“I’ll cut you,” said Swinburne, and he licked his lips. “It’ll hurt.”

If she senses his mood now, Trelawny thought sourly as he tightened his hand on the slick leather grip, she’ll simply imagine he’s gone back to the sport at the Verbena Lodge.

Swinburne lunged, driving his point toward Trelawny’s shoulder, and at the last moment spun the point around the old man’s bell-guard and jabbed for the elbow; but in the same instant Trelawny fell backward, folding his arm across his chest, and sat down heavily on the hearth, rapping his tailbone against the bricks and rattling the fire screen.

Swinburne paused over him and giggled breathlessly. “Now I know that all your exploits in your books were lies! Pirates, sea battles, Arab brides!”

He eyed Trelawny’s raised knee and dropped his point toward it.

And Trelawny straightened his leg forcefully, kicking Swinburne’s forward ankle out from under him; as the young man fell on him, Trelawny parried his blade aside and with his free hand punched the young poet very hard on the shelf of his descending jaw.

Swinburne tumbled into his arms, unconscious.

Very quickly, for Miss B. would have sensed that blow, Trelawny pushed Swinburne’s limp form off him — the little poet hardly weighed more than a child — and stood up to snatch the box from the mantel.

The poet had rolled over on the carpet and was now face-down, and Trelawny crouched beside him and flipped him onto his back, and with a fingertip collected a smear of blood from Swinburne’s lip — and he had no sooner smeared it around the grooves in the box’s mirrored interior than his panting breath became a visible plume of steam.

The room was suddenly very cold, and books and papers flew in a whirlwind as a loud, fracturing buzz rattled the few pictures that weren’t tumbling off the walls.

Trelawny spun toward the window and flinched as he held the open box up in front of himself.

Boadicea of the Iceni had arrived from out of the night.

Iridescent gleams played over the scaled serpent’s body as it swung heavily in the vibrating air, its wings a blurred gale of rainbow colors; vertically slitted eyes like poisonous golden apples swiveled back and forth in the room’s brightness.

Trelawny could feel the freezing chill of her gaze as it swept past him — and then his hands were numbed as she focused on the box.

And the serpent shape rippled and seemed to implode, and the floor shook as it fell and crashed to the carpet. Trelawny kept the box aimed at the bending, darkening shape. Streamers of heavy black smoke blew away from her and out the open window.

The eyes had shrunk to black stones, but they could not look away from the mirrors that were etched now with Swinburne’s beloved blood.

Boadicea was a spasming black fetus now, waving stiffening limbs on the carpet as more of the thick black smoke burst out of her and spun away; Trelawny was able to scuff closer on his knees, and he could still feel the electric shiver of her attention in the box in his aching hands.

At last, with a loud crack, she lay still on the frosted carpet, a black statue no more than two inches long — and he lowered the box onto her and gingerly tilted it to scoop her inside as he swung the lid shut.

For nearly a minute he didn’t move, but just knelt there, gasping as the night breeze from the open window warmed the room. Thick black soot stained the floor and wall and windowsill.

Carefully he lifted the box an inch, and it was not particularly heavy — and he allowed his muscles to relax a little; her mass was nearly all gone, presumably carried away in the billows of leaden smoke. This trick had indeed drastically diminished her.

At last he got shakily to his feet and swung the latch on the box’s exterior, shutting her in. He tucked it under his coat and gripped it against his ribs with his elbow.

Swinburne, sprawled on the carpet over by the fireplace, had begun to snore. Trelawny retrieved both rapiers and hung them back up on their hooks; the scattered papers and books he left where they lay, and after taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long, shivering exhalation, he turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

CHAPTER FIVE

JOHANNA HAD BEEN living in the house on Wych Street for three days, sleeping in Mrs. Middleditch’s old room — apparently more in the closet than on the bed, according to the maid, and always with McKee’s bright-eyed goldfinch close at hand — and haphazardly assisting Crawford in the surgery, when Christina Rossetti finally responded to Crawford’s note.

When Christina arrived at one P.M., Johanna had only ten minutes earlier returned from the latest of her so-far daily “shoreline sorties,” which took her to the river for conferences, or it might have been fights, with the newest crop of Mud Larks; when she had returned from the first such expedition with a black eye and scraped knees and mud stains on her new clothes, Crawford had told her not to go there again, but she had insisted that she needed to — the Mud Larks were all prepubescent children who had had dealings with the Nephilim, and they were hired by the old Mud Lark man to recognize and follow people who “had a whiff of the Neff about them” and report any such to the old man. “There’s a lot of stirring about among the Neffies,” Johanna had told Crawford as he’d dabbed some Lugol’s iodine on her knees — he gathered that the term referred to people who were currently or had once been infected by a vampire or were perceptibly soliciting it—“I’m too old now to mix with the Larks anymore, but they’re all real aware of him being out again, picking up his old sources. I need to — we need me to — keep track of him as much as can be done.”

Adelaide McKee had stopped in for brief visits every afternoon, and yesterday she had viewed Johanna’s black eye with rueful fatalism. “Those Mud Larks are mostly a damaged lot,” was all she had said. “Always see a way out and have your knife handy.”

Johanna had nodded. “I know,” she said, “I was one myself for a while,” making McKee and Crawford both wince.

Yesterday afternoon Crawford had taken Johanna with him to Allen’s riding school in Bryanston Square. Mr. Allen hired out his horses as much as he used them for lessons, and even in the off-season he charged five or six guineas rent a month, and so he was anxious to keep them healthy; hardly a week went by without Crawford getting a summons from him. Yesterday Crawford had shown Johanna how to press her ear to the left side of the horse’s chest, just forward of the seventh rib, and use his new watch to count the heartbeats; she had used some mnemonic system she’d learned for estimating the number of loose shoes in different-sized shipping crates to memorize the proper pulse rate for different breeds and ages of the horses.

Now she was kneeling on a stool by the marble counter, kneading linseed oil into a mix of bran, mashed turnips, and lard — the concoction was to be sent to Mr. Allen’s for a horse suffering from strangles, inflammation of a gland behind the jaw. The goldfinch’s cage was on a shelf by the windows.

It was not a day when Crawford had servants in, so when he heard the door chime, he leaned a mop against the wall and hurried through the dining room and down the hall to the street door and pulled it open.

Standing on the gravel pavement in the midday sun, Christina Rossetti looked older than the intervening seven years could justify; her hair was the same shade of brown as before, and her face and throat were still smooth, but some spirit or liveliness seemed to have been taken out of her.

Crawford touched his own gray beard. “Miss Rossetti,” he said quietly, “thank you for coming. Let me take your hat and coat. We’re in the back, in the surgery.”

Christina stepped up over the threshold, and Crawford saw her glance at all the mirrors that were now hung in the entry.

“And your house reeks of garlic,” she noted in an approving tone. She took off her coat and handed it and her bonnet to him. “You wrote that Adelaide is with you?”

“Not exactly.” Crawford hung the things on hooks between mirrors. “Not at the moment,” he added, leading the way. “I’m with our daughter, Johanna.”

Christina Rossetti shuffled after him through the dining room into the white-tiled surgery, and she blinked around, in the gray light from the windows, at beakers and books and mortars and pestles and the rows of glass-stoppered Winchester bottles full of variously colored liquids like extract of belladonna, sugar of lead, and spirits of turpentine. She wrinkled her nose at the cacophony of smells, not least of which was the acid odor from the mop bucket, and then stared uneasily at a big print hung on the far wall, an etching of a horse exhibiting thirty numbered equine maladies all at once.

Johanna looked up and raised her lard-caked hands. “Hello!” she said brightly, wiggling her fingers. “Have you had lunch?”

“This is our daughter, Johanna,” said Crawford nervously. “Uh, careful, the floor’s wet. I was mopping.”

“You—” began Christina; then she gasped and said to Johanna, “You were following me yesterday!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Johanna. “Yes! You had on a brown coat and bonnet. The girl I was with—”

Christina looked ill. “Ragged leather trousers with braces? That was a girl?”

Johanna nodded and resumed kneading the poultice. “I hear she cuts her face with cold iron whenever she gets frightened. Nancy doesn’t talk at all, but she’s a wonder for sniffing out Neffies. She could smell your history on you, and she wanted to see if you’d got bit again.” Johanna looked up and smiled. “Lucky for you she decided you haven’t been!”

“No,” agreed Christina, blinking bewilderedly at the girl. “I haven’t been.”

“Uh,” said Crawford, “speaking of such things, I wrote to you — because—”

The doorbell rang again.

“Excuse me,” he said, and hurried back to the front door and pulled it open.

McKee stood there in the dress she apparently always wore.

“He’s passed out drunk,” she said evenly. “I can stay for an hour.” She stepped past him into the house. “Johanna’s in the surgery?”

“With Christina Rossetti. She—”

“She finally responds to her correspondence! And I’m sure her brother was lying.”

Crawford nodded as he led her through to the back of the house. He and McKee had found the Rossetti house in Euston Square, and Christina’s brother William had told them on several visits that his sister was not at home.

McKee sniffed and spat when she stepped into the surgery. “Always smells in here like somebody tried hard to burn something that doesn’t really burn.”

“Ah,” said Crawford, “Miss Rossetti, Miss — Mrs. — ” He waved vaguely. “You know each other.”

“Adelaide!” said Christina with a warm smile, “it’s wonderful to see you again! I’m sorry I was too ill to receive you on Sunday and yesterday!”

McKee nodded, half smiling. “You’re here now,” she allowed.

“Miss or Mrs.?” said Christina, raising her eyebrows.

McKee frowned and opened her mouth to reply — but at that moment the caged bird cheeped several times, and a banging crash sounded from the front of the house, and then heavy boots were clumping in the hall.

Christina sprang nimbly to the doorway and leaned against the wall beside it, one hand in her handbag; Johanna snatched her knife out of the sheath inside her shirt, swearing softly as she gripped it in her greasy right hand; Crawford sprang toward the cabinet where the scalpels were kept and slipped on the wet floor and sat down hard; and McKee, shaking her head, crossed her arms and stood in the middle of the tile floor.

She was looking through the doorway into the dining room, and she said, “Tom, what the hell are you doing?”

“Don’t speak to me, whore!” yelled a big unshaven man who now reeled into the room. “Where is he?”

His face was red under a shapeless hat, and the old black coat he wore was stretched across massive shoulders, and in his gnarled fist he gripped a foot-long iron rod. He blinked blearily at the people in the room, and his watery gaze fixed on Crawford, who had hurriedly got back on his feet.

“Hah!” the man said to him. “You don’t even buy her clothes! I do!”

“Tom,” said McKee loudly, “go back home. You know I buy my own—”

Tom turned toward her and raised the iron bar—

And a short, sharp explosion concussed the air of the little room, and everyone flinched.

Crawford, still clutching a scalpel with a ludicrous inch-long blade, straightened and blinked around. His ears were ringing, and the reek of burned gunpowder now eclipsed the room’s ordinary smells.

Tom had stepped back, half lowering the iron rod, his face blank; Johanna had ducked under the counter; and McKee was staring at Christina, who was holding a smoking revolver in both hands.

Crawford’s gaze swept over Tom, but he saw no blood, and then Johanna, peeking up from under the counter, pointed behind him. Crawford turned and saw a ragged hole in the plaster of the wall.

McKee stepped forward and wrenched the bar out of Tom’s hand. “Well done, Sister Christina!” she called, without taking her eyes off him.

Abruptly a second gunshot shook the room, and this time Crawford cringed at the shrill twang of a ricochet and saw the pistol spin across the tile floor. Johanna darted out and snatched it up and pointed it at Tom, who now had his eyes clenched shut. The goldfinch was fluttering wildly in its cage.

Johanna briefly caught Crawford’s eye and nodded toward the cabinets in the dining-room side wall, where another hole had been punched through the white-painted wood of one of the doors.

Christina had evidently dropped the gun, and it had gone off when it hit the floor — and the bullet must have missed her by only a yard or so.

Her face was white, but after looking around at everyone, she managed an awkward laugh. “I’d dig those out,” she quavered. “They’re silver.”

“You get out of here,” said Johanna, straightening up but keeping the gun barrel leveled at Tom. “Never come back.”

“Johanna,” said McKee, “he’s your—”

“Stepfather?” said the girl calmly. “I’ll step on him.”

This disrespect seemed to snap Tom out of his daze.

“Give me that,” he growled, stepping forward.

Johanna cocked the hammer with her thumb and smiled at him, and Crawford wondered if the child might have killed someone before.

“Bullet holes in the walls,” Johanna said, “respectable people menaced in their own home by a drunk vagrant, a little girl kills the man — you think I’d do any time? — even be arraigned?”

“Vagrant!” Tom sputtered. “Drunk!” But he had retreated to the doorway.

“Go home, Tom,” said McKee. “Nothing immoral is going on here. I’ll be along in an hour.”

Tom was breathing hard, and he wiped a grimy hand across his mouth. “Your front rooms stink of garlic,” he said gruffly, “and you got mirrors everywhere — and I know the uses of silver! There’s people who go the other way, drink out of purple glasses under London Bridge — I can bring your troubles to you, wait and see if I can’t.”

Then he had spun and was clumping quickly through the dining room to the hall.

McKee caught Johanna as the girl began to hurry after him. “Let him go, child.”

The front door banged loudly.

“We need to kill him!” Johanna protested, as McKee grabbed the gun with her thumb under the hammer and pulled it out of the girl’s hand.

“Johanna, he’s my husband!”

“Do you have any sherry?” Christina asked Crawford.

Crawford nodded and stepped past McKee, who was holding on to the gun. A moment later he was back from the dining room with a decanter in one hand and a small glass in the other.

“You won’t drop it again?” McKee was saying to Christina as she handed the gun back to her.

“No,” Christina said sheepishly, tucking it back into her handbag. “I hope I didn’t sprain my hand shooting it! I only carry it in case I should run into something like what Gabriel shot, that day in Regent’s Park.”

“The eighteen-hundred-year-old British queen,” said Johanna, still scowling toward the front of the house, “who looked like a dog.”

Christina stared in evident surprise at the girl.

Crawford mussed Johanna’s hair and told her, “You did very well there.”

“Not as well as Nancy would have,” said the girl darkly. “I think he broke our front door.”

Christina took the glass of sherry after Crawford had poured it and handed it to her, and she gulped it and held it out again.

“That was—” she began, as Crawford refilled it. “Uh,” she went on, “the child lives here, I gather? With her father?”

“That was my husband, yes,” said McKee with a defiant look. “And yes, Johanna lives here, for now.”

“Only one glass?” said Johanna. “I could use a bracer myself.”

McKee looked down at her in alarm and said, “Never mind, I think we could all use some tea. In the parlor, if my husband has verifiably left the premises.”

“I CAN NAIL IT shut,” Crawford said as they sat down in the parlor, “and we can come and go by the back door until I get a carpenter in.”

The garlic smell was, as Tom had noted, very strong in the room.

“I’ll pay for it,” said McKee.

“You didn’t do it,” said Crawford.

Johanna put in, “Let him sell a lot of spoons to pay for it.” One of the three-legged cats pulled itself up onto the couch beside her and she began petting it.

Crawford cleared his throat. “We imagine,” he said to Christina, “that you know your uncle is up again. Whatever it was you did at the cemetery worked for these seven years, but—”

Christina’s hand had flown to her mouth. “Has he … molested you people? His connections were all broken then, I’d have hoped—”

“Yes,” said McKee. “He seems specifically to want our daughter.”

“I’m so sorry! We’ve got, my siblings and I, a plan to stop him finally, kill him. We hope to—”

“How?” asked Johanna.

“When?” added McKee.

“Well — soon. Gabriel is getting permission to … to go to where he is, where his physical form is … “Her voice trailed off.

“And it’s a statue, the physical form, you said,” recalled Crawford. “Small enough for a fourteen-year-old girl to put under her pillow and sleep on.”

“And you rubbed blood on it,” added McKee.

“I’m glad you’re my father,” Johanna remarked, “not that old shit wagon.”

“Damn it, Johanna,” McKee burst out, “that old shit wagon is my husband!”

“Common law,” said Johanna.

Christina was frowning and had closed her eyes.

Crawford started to speak, but he feared that his voice might catch if he spoke, so he just reached across the table to pat Johanna’s hand.

Johanna noticed Christina’s evident disapproval. “At least I know better than to wake up devils,” she said, “and I’m only thirteen.”

Christina opened her eyes and nodded. “A valid point, my dear.”

“Where is the statue,” asked McKee, “that you need to get permission to go there? A vault in a museum?”

Christina looked distressed. “I can’t — it’s not my secret to reveal—”

“It’s in a grave in Highgate Cemetery,” said Johanna casually. “He dreamed about it a lot when I was with him.”

Christina turned to face the girl. “Do you know if it’s still there, in the grave? We fear that his recent activity might be the result of the statue having dug its way out.”

Johanna shook her head. “Do I still look bitten? I haven’t been with him since that day you killed him.” Then she shivered and clasped her hands. “But the statue doesn’t have to be out of the grave for him to be out.”

“That’s true,” conceded Christina.

“It’s in her coffin?” asked Crawford. “Lizzie’s? Or was, at least? You buried it that day?”

“No,” blurted Christina, “it’s in my father’s coffin — in his throat, to be precise!” She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and patted her forehead. “We buried Lizzie right on top of him and put mirrors in her coffin to reflect him back on himself.”

“Then it must have unburied itself,” said McKee, “or else somebody dug it up.” She shook her head. “No use you getting permission to open the grave — and was that your whole plan?”

Christina took a breath. “Yes,” she said, exhaling.

“Damn. I was hoping you could do the 1862 thing again. I wonder if we could flee to America.”

“We offered you passage to America ten years ago,” said Christina, “as an indentured domestic, and you can still do that.” She looked at Crawford. “And they might need veterinarians.”

“And their child?” asked Johanna.

“I’m — not sure,” Christina admitted.

“Tom would never agree to go,” said McKee hopelessly.

For several seconds no one spoke. And, thought Crawford, in any case they probably have as many spoon sellers in America as they need.

He cleared his throat and said to McKee, “I wouldn’t go without you, not again.”

“That’s the boy!” said Johanna.

“We, my family and I,” said Christina hurriedly, “are going to find out, try to, tonight, whether in fact the statue is still in the grave.”

McKee raised her eyebrows. “Find out how?”

“We’re going to try to talk to Lizzie.” She shrugged and rolled her eyes upward. “We’re going to hold a séance.”

THE BAY WINDOW HAD been repaired since the devils had crashed through it four evenings ago, but the side panels were now unlatched and swung open to the cool night air. A bell at the nearby Church of St. Luke tolled eight P.M., giving punctuation to the fainter bells of boats on the river.

Gabriel and his assistant had carried a smaller table into the dining room and pushed the long table to the side. A pad of drawing paper and a handful of pencils had been laid out on the smaller table.

The gas jets had been turned off, and a candle on the table, and half a dozen more on the mantel, made the long room seem churchlike and much bigger.

Maria sat at the far end of the room, expressionless but nevertheless radiating disapproval, and Christina sighed and got up from beside her to cross to the table.

“Where have you sent Algy tonight?” she asked Gabriel.

He sat down beside William and waved his sister to the third chair. “He’s off at … some club he belongs to. He probably won’t be coming back here.”

“Just as well,” said William. “He wouldn’t be serious.”

Christina suppressed a smile as she sat down. Who would have thought that the skeptical William would be so earnest about fishing in the supernatural? But of course he considered it science.

“How do we do it?” she asked, ignoring a sigh from the far end of the room.

“I’ve written the alphabet,” said Gabriel, “on the top sheet of paper. One of us asks a question aloud and then touches each letter in turn — the table will rap, or perhaps tilt, when the right letter is touched. If the question can be answered yes or no, one rap means yes, two means uncertain, and three means no. Five is a request to use the alphabet again.”

“They’re not always … precise,” warned William. “Even the brightest of them has trouble spelling, sometimes.”

“Do they lose their intelligence, when they die?” Christina asked, remembering her father’s fishlike ghost in the river.

“I think it’s more that they don’t clearly see the paper,” William replied, “and … well, and they do seem to lose some power of concentration.” He smiled. “So we have to concentrate especially hard.” Formally and more loudly, he said, “Is any spirit present?”

Several seconds ticked past.

Then a knock shook the table, and Christina shivered and glanced at her brothers, but they were both frowning intently at the paper.

“Spell your surname,” said William, and he began touching the penciled letters slowly, one by one.

As he touched the letters, four spaced knocks shook the wood under Christina’s hands.

“E-R-O-S,” said Gabriel. “Eros? Hardly helpful.”

William said, “Is E the initial of your Christian name?”

A single rap.

“Is R the initial of your surname?”

Another rap. Gabriel’s face gleamed with sweat in the candlelight.

William said, “Are you Lizzie, my brother’s wife?”

Gabriel’s “Yes” overlapped the single knock.

“Do you know I love you?” asked Gabriel, his voice a controlled monotone.

Ten seconds passed with no knock.

William cleared his throat. “Do you—”

“Give her time!” interrupted Gabriel.

Another ten seconds passed, and Gabriel looked away and fluttered his hand.

William said, “Do you know if the statue of our uncle is still in our father’s grave?”

Three knocks sounded, then, after a pause, two more. No, thought Christina. Not sure.

Abruptly there were five knocks in a row. Christina jumped.

William obediently reached out to touch the alphabet letters again; and he touched S-T-O-P-T-H-I-S. Then, after a pause, G-O-D-B-Y.

“Lizzie,” said William, “are you still with us?”

Three sharper knocks shook the wood. No.

“Are you a different spirit?”

A single rap. Yes.

God help us, thought Christina, who is this?

“Do you know if the statue is still in our father’s grave?”

A single knock sounded in reply.

“Is it?” blurted Christina. “Still there?”

Again a single knock.

“This might be anyone,” William cautioned softly. More loudly, he went on, “Can you tell us your name?”

Three raps. No.

“Do you have a name?”

Three more raps.

William looked up at his brother and sister and shook his head in evident bafflement.

A thought occurred to Christina. “Can you spell?” she asked.

Three more knocks sounded in reply.

William shrugged. “I don’t know how much we can learn from this spirit, with just yes and no and maybe.”

It’s not Uncle John, thought Christina — he can write whole stories. “Can you draw,” she asked, “if one of us holds the pencil?”

A single knock sounded in reply. Yes.

“Christina,” called Maria from the other end of the room, “don’t give it your hand!”

But Christina had already picked up the pencil, and Gabriel tore the top sheet of paper off the pad.

“Draw yourself,” said Christina.

Her hand dropped the pencil and then picked it up again, holding it now as if it were a lever; and then it lunged toward the pad and quickly outlined two crude figures, one tall with circles for breasts and a rank of lines for long hair, the other figure shorter and stick-thin. Then four lines and a zigzag made a broken window behind them.

It’s Lizzie again, thought Christina; no, Boadicea — but her hand drew a circle around the head of the smaller figure.

“Damn me,” whispered Gabriel, “it’s that starved child-ghost!”

“How do you know,” asked William, “that the statue is still in our father’s grave?”

Christina’s hand was beginning to ache from its awkward grip of the pencil, which now again moved jerkily, outlining a horizontal rectangle and, inside it, a quick back-and-forth squiggle that seemed to be a recumbent body — and between the round head-loop and the oval of the chest it ground a black dot into the paper.

“That’s our father’s coffin!” whispered Gabriel. “And that dot is in his throat.”

“But how do you know?” persisted William. “Who are you?”

Christina winced as her hand now drew another rectangle directly above the first one.

“I wish he could hold a pencil properly!” she gasped.

More slowly, the pencil outlined another supine body in profile, inside this second rectangle. Peering past her own hand, Christina saw a curve indicating a bosom and another curve, bigger … pregnancy? A coffin directly over our father’s … that must be meant to represent Lizzie’s body.

Her hand drew a little spidery asterisk inside the pregnancy curve, then circled the asterisk shape and drew a line from it to the circle it had drawn around the head of the stick-thin figure in the first drawing.

Gabriel gave a choked gasp and pushed himself back from the table. “Merciful God!” he whispered. “It’s my child; it’s the child Lizzie was carrying when she died!”

William leaned back quickly, half raising a hand, and Christina knew that her own face must be as stiff with horror as his was.

But her hand would not release the pencil, and she could not pull it away from the paper.

The pencil lifted and returned to the figure of the pregnant woman — and though the point was getting blunted, it drew a curve from the spidery fetus to the bottom line of the coffin, and there it drew a series of Xs along that line; then the point made a line straight up, right out of the coffin rectangle and off the top of the paper.

Perhaps because it was her own hand making the picture, Christina understood it. “It broke the mirrors,” she said softly, “and carried the pieces away to the surface.”

“He,” said Gabriel in a hollow tone. “Not it.”

A hand on Christina’s shoulder made her jump, but it was just Maria, who had at some point walked up behind her.

And now Christina’s hand sprang open, dropping the pencil, and she pulled it back and massaged it with her left hand.

“Destroy that drawing,” said Maria, and her voice was oddly low in pitch, and getting lower: “and … the … pencil…”

Sudden gray light dazzled Christina, and her chair shifted as if in an earthquake; she grabbed for the table but fell forward and her outstretched hands slapped against a horizontal plank, and she wasn’t in the chair at all but sitting on a similar plank; and when she squinted quickly around herself she saw gunwale rails and rope rigging, and realized dazedly that she was sitting alone in a boat.

And the boat was swaying from side to side, but with the keel swinging most widely, as if the boat were a pendulum. She gasped and leaned back, gripping the thwart she was sitting on, and the cold wind that fluttered her hair smelled of steamy smoke, like a fire doused with water.

She looked upward to see what moored the top of the mast, but saw only gray sky above it.

Then she wasn’t alone. “It won’t fall,” said a heavy voice from in front of her.

She gasped and lowered her head and was not entirely surprised to see the young man sitting now on the thwart across from her. The deep eyes and curly dark hair and mustache were of course familiar from the portrait that had hung on the wall of every house she’d lived in. But he was hunched over and deathly pale.

For one flickering moment the figure was the squat, eyeless form of Mouth Boy, and then it was John Polidori again.

Christina could hear her pulse throbbing in her temples.

“You crave two things,” he said. “Your poetry and me. And we are one thing. You have found my attention again, but not yet my help again. You must let me help you. And therefore you must help me.”

Three lines of one of her poems occurred to her: There’s blood between us, love, my love, / There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood, / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass.

And though she had only thought the lines, he gave her a stiff smile that did nothing to change the humorless cast of his eyes.

“You use my gift to say me no,” came his voice, and she noticed that the sound of it lagged behind the motion of his lips, as if he were far away.

“I am a jealous god,” he went on, “and I offer you the same. Will you be jealous if I take … your sister, Maria?”

“Maria,” Christina said hoarsely, gripping the thwart under her, “is consecrated to your adversary.”

Polidori opened his mouth, and now he quoted four lines of a poem of Gabriel’s:

“Help me,” he said. “I have always loved you best. Maria is not who I want.”

Christina’s heartbeat had slowed, since the impossible boat did appear to be securely moored somehow, and she ventured a glance out over the gunwale — in the middle distance, winged things with bodies like octopi and jellyfish flapped heavily through the humid air, and dimly in the remoter grayness she could just make out tall mountains or towers.

Maria would recoil from any whiff of this, she thought. And I will at least turn away.

“No,” she said, blinking back tears. “I can live without me — I mean, without you.”

“What you can do without me,” he said sadly, “is die. Talk to me — you know how.”

And then she was sitting at the table in Gabriel’s dimly lit dining room again, panting hard and clutching the seat of her chair and wincing at Maria’s tight grip on her shoulder. She glanced around wildly, but the pinpoint radiances of the few candles in the room were not enough for her dazzled eyes to see anything.

“Maria, let go!” she gasped, and Maria’s hand was gone. “Gabriel, William, are you here?”

From across the table came a croaked “Yes” that might have been either of them. “Yes,” came a second assent, this one recognizably Gabriel’s breathless voice.

“Ach!” coughed Maria from behind Christina’s chair. “Why did I touch you? Our terrible uncle! I must wash my hand.”

“Gabriel,” said Christina, “light, for God’s sake.”

One of the figures on the other side of the table blundered to its feet, and she heard the rattle of a matchbox.

“I,” said William, “saw none of you there.”

A match flared, and then Gabriel had lit a gas jet on the wall and turned the valve all the way open. Christina squinted in the relative glare as the cabinets and wallpaper of the familiar room became visible again. She looked over her shoulder and saw Maria scowling.

“Where were you?” Gabriel asked.

“A room,” said William, rubbing his eyes, “in a tower, I think. It was full of scrolls, poetry, and I could read them all. And I knew—” He stopped and shook his head. “And I can’t remember any of the verses now — and they were all beautiful.”

Like Coleridge unable to remember the unwritten bulk of Kubla Khan, thought Christina — and suddenly she was sure that, in William’s vision, he himself had been the author of the vanished verses. Recalling his real-world attempts at poetry, Christina winced now in pity.

“I was on a beach made of glass,” said Gabriel. He shuffled carefully to the next gas jet and struck another match. “There was an ocean, and it was made of water, but the waves … walked, toward me.” He shivered visibly, and had to strike another match.

William dropped his hands and blinked at Christina.

She hesitantly described her own vision but found that she had finished without having mentioned their uncle’s presence in it.

“Into my head,” came Maria’s voice from behind Christina, “against my will! — he projected a view of the interior of a — a skull, an enormous skull. I seemed to be standing inside it. And he was there, and he said filthy things to me.”

“What did he say?” asked William, but Maria just shook her head.

Christina wondered if their uncle had been in all their visions, and only Maria was innocent enough to mention it.

And she wondered if he had said, to each of them, Talk to me — you know how.

Maria was still staring at her hand, which had been gripping Christina’s shoulder when the visions began. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” Maria said, perhaps to herself.

“You shouldn’t have touched me during it,” said Christina crossly. Then she shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, Maria! You’re always getting into trouble trying to help me.”

William cleared his throat. “This … statue,” he said, “is evidently still in our father’s grave. We need to — you say we need to — get it.”

“And destroy it,” added Maria.

Now Gabriel strode to the windows and pulled them closed, and Christina saw him peer fearfully outside as he latched them.

And she wondered if his son was out there — how had he described him? A boy, like a starved corpse galvanized.

JOHANNA SNAPPED AWAKE WHEN the air was suddenly cold and metallic in her nose and the light brightened beyond her closed eyelids, and her hand was on the old leather grip of her knife in the same moment that she opened her eyes.

And she flinched back in the bed, but it wasn’t a bed — she was on a curved, hard ivory slope that was broken at the top edge, and though two figures stood forty feet away on the opposite side of the bumpy ivory bowl, her gaze was helplessly caught by what was moving outside and above the broken-edged rim.

What seemed to be a tower as tall as a mountain stood in the yellow sky — but it was just perceptibly broader in the middle, and she knew it was a wheel viewed from directly in front. It was too far away for its motion to be immediately visible, but she knew that it was rushing in her direction at horrifying speed.

Knowing what she would see, she nevertheless looked up to left and right, and saw sky-scraping wheels in those directions too; and, looking straight up, she saw the miles-high rim of another above the cracked edge of this wide ivory cup.

She had been here before, and she remembered that the wheels never did actually arrive or roll past — that in fact it became difficult, if you watched them, to know in which direction any one of them was turning, though they were palpably spinning at mind-withering speeds — and that soon it would be possible to make out eyes like stars along their rims.

She shivered and drew her knife, panting. It had been a long time since she had felt at home in this place.

Her gaze snapped back down then, for one of the figures on the other side of the bowl had begun to move.

She had never seen it before; it was a skeletal boy in an overcoat of something like dead leaves, and his eyes and white teeth protruded from the gray skin stretched tightly over his skull.

He was hopping toward her over the bumps and hollows of the skull bottom, and Johanna quickly got up in a crouch and held her knife ready.

The boy paused, his eyes gleaming at her above his wide, helpless grin.

“Josephine, my daughter,” came Polidori’s leaden voice from behind the insectlike figure.

Johanna decided not to correct him again about her name. She breathed rapidly and kept her eye on the swaying mummified boy.

“This is your betrothed,” Polidori went on, “consecrated to Boadicea as you are consecrated to me. Together you will have an offspring that will fulfill her purpose, break the land.”

Without looking away from the terrible lean face that was now only a few yards from her, Johanna was peripherally aware that the remote eyes were glaring in the wheels; and then she did glance up quickly, for the sky had gone darker.

And she was viewing a city from all directions at once, no part farther or nearer than any other part, and she could trace the old buried rivers and tunnels and pipes and the towers and bridges and the decorative brass plates around doorknobs.

And then the wheels were visibly turning — and the city was moored to them and began to tear apart. The buried rivers opened to take the towers, and gravity pulled in a hundred directions.

And the boy was upon her. At the first impact of his bony knees and shoulders she lashed out convulsively with her knife, and a cold exhalation like the burst of gas from a rupturing deepwater fish was in her nostrils; then one knobby fist had bounced off the socket of her left eye, and a moment later the boy was rolling away down the ivory slope.

She blinked away tears and looked past the figure flailing in the central depression now, straight at Polidori.

He seemed somehow less distinct than he had when she had been a child and he had been her lord — she could see the eyes and the mustache, but his outline seemed to churn in her vision like an afterimage of glare.

“You will be glad to bear his child,” Polidori said, “after you invite me back.” Suddenly he was closer. “Invite me back.”

She flipped the knife and caught it by the tip, then drew it back and flung it toward the boiling center of him.

And her bed crashed to the floor in darkness, and Johanna was cursing shrilly as she scrambled out of it and wrenched open the bedroom door.

By the time she had scuffed barefoot down the stairs to the landing there was a light under her father’s door, and he opened it just in time for her to leap into his arms, nearly making him drop the newly lit candle.

“He’s found me,” she gasped into the shoulder of his nightshirt. “And he’s got—”

She couldn’t describe the skeletal boy right now, and just clung to her father. He patted her back and started carefully toward the stairs, for he knew she’d want to spend the rest of the night in the cellar.

CHAPTER SIX

WITH INADVERTENT IRONY, the window of his office at the Board of Inland Revenue gave William Rossetti a close-up view of the triangular pediments over the second-floor western windows of King’s College. If he stood up from his desk and moved around to the left side of it, he would be able to see, off to the right, a slice of the brown Thames and a warehouse or two on the south shore; but when he was sitting at the desk and reviewing his daily lot of orders and petitions, he was confronted by the school he had attended, negligently, from the ages of eight to fifteen. And he was forty now.

This morning the sight was somehow especially maddening. Last night he had, albeit in what had apparently been a hallucination, unrolled a scroll and read verses as sublime as any his brother or sister had written, and they were in his own handwriting! And there were dozens of scrolls, and he had known that all of them contained poetry he was destined to write—

But the — the librarian had come in before he could look at any more. And William had recognized the intruder from the picture his mother always kept on the parlor wall, wherever they lived.

A confident atheist, William dismissed belief in Heaven and Hell as archaic superstitions, but at a number of séances he had seen evidence that personalities did survive physical death — though the spirits who could be contacted that way always seemed to have become imbecilic, scarcely able to comprehend questions or frame answers — like Lizzie, last night, simply trying to spell out her own name!

But Polidori had offered William a different sort of survival, a virtual immortality, one in which he might seal his own identity and intellect against erosion, albeit at the cost of … well, at an abominable cost.

William pushed away the document he had been reading — a petition requesting a Civil Service pension for the widow of a deceased Excise officer — and closed his eyes to better remember the vision.

The attraction of his uncle’s offer did not lie primarily in survival of death.

What might be written on those other scrolls? What unimaginable, radiant odes, sonnets, ballads?

Gabriel and Christina, and Swinburne too, accepted William as an equal in education and appreciation of literature and art, but he was always aware of a dimension the three of them shared, lived in, that he could not enter. Their verses would be read and admired for centuries, while his translations of Dante and his edition of Shelley’s works would surely be superseded long before he even retired from the Board of Inland Revenue.

He had not moved very far from that school outside his office window.

His hand had been twitching, and looking down he saw to his alarm that he had scrawled words across the widow’s petition. He must make another copy, get her solicitor to sign it—

Then he read what he had written:

He felt the hairs on his arms standing up, and he blinked away tears; these were lines from the scroll he had read in the vision last night, and he could almost remember the next line … something, and then furthest fires oracular…

It was gone.

His uncle — for it was his uncle too — had asked for help, and said, Talk to me — you know how.

“Uncle John,” he whispered, “are you there?” and he reached out to touch an A in the petition, and then a B—

And then all at once the air on his face and hands was hot, and he was standing and stumbling forward to keep his balance in deep dry sand, squinting against a glaring sun.

He gasped in surprise and felt the hot dry air parching his lungs.

After a moment of dazed incomprehension, he clapped his hands just to hear the sound of it and feel the faint sting; and he experienced both sensations. This was as evidently real a place as his office had been a moment before.

Before him stretched an infinity of serrated dunes under the empty blue sky, and the silence was profound; no slightest breeze flicked the ridges of sand. He slid his shoes through the mounded grains to get a full-circle view—

And he gasped again. Half a mile behind him a black stone cathedral stood up as tall as St. Paul’s, taller, with nothing behind or around it except more empty miles of tan dunes.

Its pillars and arches and remote dome were rounded by centuries or millennia of erosion — and then he saw that the thing wasn’t a building at all, but a vast weathered statue: towering legs, buttresses that might have been wings, and a promontory head with no features remaining.

Eyeless, it nevertheless seemed to stare with antediluvian defiance at the sun and the wasteland.

Into William’s head came Shelley’s lines: Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.

He was shivering, but at the same time his tie and waistcoat and woolen trousers were smothering him.

He tore loose his tie and collar, but the sense of heavy oppression only intensified, and he realized that all of this, the sun and the heat and the desert, were being projected onto him by a watchful identity in the stone colossus; and the colossus itself was a projection of that identity.

A thought appeared forcefully in his mind, and he translated it into words: Help me. There was a task to be done, and of it William got only a blurred impression of blood smeared across black stone, but on the far side of it were the poems that had been written on the scrolls he had seen last night.

He tried to concentrate on that required task, to open it to articulate elaboration; and he was able to find words to convey it: The blood of my—something like onetime hosts; strayed children, adopted ones; canceled clients? — is redundant, just … repetition — reiteration! of myself. I am—again there was a cluster of applicable words: broken, ill-defined, illogically phrased—and — I cannot, impossible to, restore myself as I need to be restored.

William was shown two images: of a man and a tiny black statue, and also a series of images in between: seen left to right, the images showed the man shrinking and darkening, but viewed right to left they traced the expansion of the statue into the man.

Another thought: I need to be fully restored. Fully.

That had been conveyed clearly!

I need to be—and William intuitively provided the word quickened — fully, but with blood infested by, no, more like animated by the other of my kind, the one who is not me, spouse in relation to me, the west of my east.

The view of the desert and the colossus wavered, as if they were now just figures painted on a tapestry in a breeze. William thought he glimpsed the rectangle of his office window through them.

The intrusive identity was fading, but it raised a last thought that William phrased as, Soon, while her blood in her children still lives, circulates, reddens and fades and reddens again.

And then William was just sitting at his desk in the Excise Section wing of Somerset House, blinking out at the windows of King’s College.

His tie and collar were loosened, and he pushed his chair back to look at his shoes; a shaking of sand grains clung to the laces, but even as he watched, they evaporated to nothing.

He snatched up the widow’s petition — but the lines of verse on it had disappeared, and he couldn’t now remember what they had been.

His hands were shaking as he refastened his collar and knotted his tie, and he patted his hair and beard in case they had got disarranged in the hallucinated desert. But there were tears in his eyes.

I can’t have it yet, he thought. Our uncle needs to be quickened fully, freed from his long petrification; and for that he needs the blood of a … client, a child, a host of this other creature of his kind — the creature that is something like his spouse, referred to with a clear flavor of “she.” Perhaps there were only two of these creatures. And for some reason her vital renewal of her hosts’ blood seemed likely to cease soon.

He would, he thought almost ferally, ask Christina what she knew about that.

UNDER THE GRAY OCTOBER sky, the river was the color of steel, and the light breeze carried a smell of distant fires. Crawford and McKee and Johanna had walked out onto the broad stone pier of the old York water gate and paused just short of the steps that led down to an empty half-walled shed and a ramp that disappeared into the water; Crawford could make out a few of the paving stones that continued sloping away under the water’s surface, and he wondered how far out into the river the ramp extended. A hundred yards beyond, the tall black smokestack of a steam launch moved jauntily past, but other boats and the south shore were vague angularities in the mist.

It had been Johanna’s idea to venture down here before noon, and as Crawford looked back at the pillars of the old water gate, he reflected sourly that if McKee had proposed it, he would probably have refused.

Johanna’s left eye was swollen nearly shut; her second black eye in four days! And this morning they had found her knife stuck in the wall over her bed.

Crawford glanced down at her again, and touched her shoulder; she squinted up, but he just smiled and shook his head and let his hand fall away.

To the right of the pillars he could see the ranked phalanxes of chimneys along the roof of the elegant Adelphi block of flats, and the many rows of windows shone only with repetitions of the cloudy sky. Waterloo Bridge was farther off in that direction, its arches dim in the fog.

McKee followed his gaze. “That’s where we first met,” she said quietly, “about at the second arch.”

Johanna had been watching the visible extent of George Street beyond the pillars behind them, but now she looked up.

“When he saved your life?” she asked.

“Yes,” said McKee.

“And I was conceived,” Johanna added. Clearly she had been told the word sometime and remembered it.

McKee gave Crawford an accusing look, and he shrugged helplessly.

“I know about such things,” Johanna assured her. “I was nearly married to a coster boy last year.”

“Good heavens,” said Crawford.

“I didn’t fancy him,” said Johanna, shrugging, “so I ran away.”

This was straying far too close to the events of her vision last night; clearly McKee thought so too, for she put her arm protectively around Johanna and started to say something, then just shook her head.

McKee had come to Crawford’s house early this morning, with a carpenter to make an estimate for fixing the door, and at first she had assumed that her daughter’s black eye was again the work of one of the Mud Larks; and when she had heard the full story of the attack by Polidori, and what Polidori had proposed, she had forbidden all further talk of it for now.

Crawford knew that even before the events of last night, McKee had hated not living with her daughter — apparently she didn’t believe her common-law husband could be trusted with the girl — but she clearly couldn’t bear it now.

McKee had mentioned, on the walk down to the river this morning, that Tom had not come home last night after his spectacular rage in Crawford’s surgery yesterday. It was hard to tell what she felt about that.

From not too far away, Crawford now heard high piping voices taking turns reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence — he was able to make out the words When the sky began to roar—

Abruptly the goldfinch in Johanna’s bag cheeped, and half a dozen seagulls that had been standing at the edge of the pier spread their long gray-and-white wings and flapped away into the sky.

“Larks coming,” said Johanna tensely. “I know some of ’em, a bit.”

Crawford looked back up the street, between the gate pillars; and he glimpsed a couple of children dart from one side of George Street to the other, and then a third child scampered back the other way. They were all ragged little scarecrows, with lean, blackened limbs flexing in tattered clothes. They seemed to move as rapidly as spiders.

Crawford was suddenly afraid that they might stressfully remind Johanna of the skeletal boy in her vision. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, but she was already shaking her head reassuringly at him.

“These are alive,” she told him.

“They shouldn’t hurt us,” said McKee. “We’re not infected.”

“I was,” said Johanna, “and I’m sure you two still carry the smell of Neffy attention.” She touched the knife hilt under her coat. “And the Larks are crazy. I was.”

Now three of the wild children scuffed barefoot out onto the flagstones of the pier, their knees bent and their scrawny arms held out from their sides; their faces held no expression. Crawford shivered, remembering the morning he and McKee had eluded a previous generation of these children seven years ago.

And then he shivered violently enough to click his teeth together, and his chest suddenly felt cold and empty — for he remembered thinking then that his lost daughter would be the same age as those eerie children; and now, for the first time, it had occurred to him that she might very well have been one of them.

Johanna was scanning the dirty, vacuous faces. “Where’s Nancy?” she called.

A boy came out from behind the pillars and joined the first three in the gray daylight. He mumbled something.

“Down, sick or dead,” muttered Johanna to her parents. “This boy hasn’t got many words.”

More loudly, she said, “You see that we’re clean. Take us to the old man. The old man, right?”

Her brown hair was blowing around her face, and Crawford was struck by the contrast between her evident health — even with the black eye — and the wasted faces of the Mud Larks. She gave Crawford an uncertain grin. “I think they know I was one of them once. They knew it yesterday, at least.”

The boy said something that sounded to Crawford like a chicken gobbling.

“I’m as clean as you are,” Johanna said scornfully; and Crawford suppressed a reflexive nervous smile at the apparent inappropriateness of the remark. Johanna waved a hand around her head. “Are you already too old to see?”

The boy shrugged and stepped back, and another one of the children took an egg-shaped clay ball out of a pocket and blew into it.

It produced a prolonged low note that seemed to vibrate in Crawford’s abdomen, and he realized that he had heard this same sound on many mornings and assumed it was some sort of maritime signal.

OVER A SCANTY BREAKFAST this morning — in the surgery, since the carpenter was making too much noise for comfortable talk anywhere else — Johanna had told her parents that the Mud Larks between Hungerford and Blackfriars Bridges, unlike their brethren farther up or down-river, didn’t make much of their living by grubbing in the Thames mud at low tide for tools and brass nails dropped overboard by shipfitters. These local ones ventured out into the mud mainly to bag the awkward fishes and river worms that had become inhabited by recently deceased ghosts, which they passed along to the old man who provided them in return with food and a boat to sleep in. “And we used to — well, they still do — range inland before dawn as far as Covent Garden, to watch for the glow of bitten people and follow them to where they lived. The old man would pay silver for an address like that.”

And she had pointed out, in a matter-of-fact tone Crawford found unnerving, that if the old man could be induced to provide one of those addresses today, the three of them might be able to “ambush the vampire with silver bullets when he next visits that place.”

McKee had paced Crawford’s surgery, chewing a piece of toast and glancing at the holes made by silver bullets in his wall and cabinet, and finally said, “We have to try it. We’ve clearly got no real way of eluding Sister Christina’s damned uncle.”

THE CHILD ON THE old stone pier blew into the clay egg again, and once more the penetrating low note rolled away up through the city streets and out across the river.

McKee was frowning at the ragged clothes and soot-stained faces of the Larks. “I gather this old man isn’t much concerned with the welfare of his young employees!”

Johanna peered up at her. “You take one in sometime and try to civilize him! We — they’re all stepped on by the vampires and lucky to have got away. We wouldn’t look at a bath, we ate like dogs, and new clothes wouldn’t have stayed new long in the river mud.” She shifted on the pavement, peering up the street. “I was lucky to find that costermonger family that needed help, after I got too old to see the way the Larks do. I was a young wreck — afraid to bathe, always hiding food in odd places around the house, hardly able to speak English. The costers had a lot of patience — gave me a bit of refinement.”

Crawford looked out over the rippling water, not wanting to meet McKee’s eyes.

And so he saw the canoe slanting in toward the water gate a moment before its keel scraped against the ancient ramp, and with a chill that tightened his scalp he recognized the old man who hopped out of the narrow craft and waded in hip boots up to the steps, holding a mooring rope.

“The luckless Medicus and Rahab,” said Trelawny with piratical cheer as he crouched to tie the rope around a rusted cleat. He stood up and stretched. He was hatless this morning, his white hair and beard all blown outward into spikes, and his collar was open. “And,” he began, glancing at Johanna — but the derisive smile unkinked from his scarred lips. “Ah,” he said, squinting and frowning intently now, and he snapped his fingers; “Johanna!” He stared at her. “I’m glad to see you well, girl, except for that aubergine eye.” He jerked a thumb toward Crawford and McKee. “You’re with these two? You could do better.”

“And worse,” said Johanna cautiously.

“You’re the, the Mud Lark man?” asked Crawford.

“I serve that purpose,” the old man said.

“Samson,” said McKee, and it took Crawford a baffled moment to remember the name Trelawny had given them on that day in Regent’s Park—My spiritual hair has almost completely grown back, I believe—“we need to get the address of one of the Polidori vampire’s currently living subjects.”

Trelawny sighed. “Who are you looking for? My Larks only monitor—”

“Any subject,” McKee interrupted. “We simply want to know an address he’s likely to arrive at — a place he’s been invited into.”

The old man nodded. “You want to cripple him down, as Mr. Hearts did to Miss B. that day with his silver bullets. That’s a prohibitive lot of risk to take, my dear, just to buy a few days of his absence.”

McKee nodded. “Nevertheless.”

Trelawny looked away up the river, then back at her. “Well, I—” He blew out a breath, and the laugh that followed was rueful. “I’m afraid I wrecked any chance of an ambush at the only address I knew of, as it happens. Five days ago I tried that myself, but I wasn’t able to get a clear shot, and he fled. He won’t go back there, and his — his subject, poor old creature, has certainly moved by now.”

“You,” said Crawford cautiously, “weren’t able to get a clear shot.”

The old man scowled at him. “You weren’t there! You think you could have done better? My eye is still better than—”

He shook his head, then crouched beside Johanna and patted her arm.

“It does me good to see you so healthy these days, child. But who gave you the black eye then? Not one of these two, I hope for their sakes! And what business have you got with them?”

“These are my parents.”

“Ah!” he said, straightening up. “Yes, it was mentioned that they had a daughter.”

“And I got the black eye—” she began, but McKee shushed her.

“He needs to know it,” Johanna insisted. “The Polidori vampire came to me in a vision last night…” Her voice trailed off.

Trelawny seemed to notice the cluster of Mud Larks by the pillars, and he dismissed them with an angry wave. When they scattered, he pointed at Johanna. “You were one of his, weren’t you, before he went into eclipse? I suppose he wants you back again.”

“Yes,” she said, “but for a purpose—” And though her voice quavered and she clutched her parents’ hands tightly, she described the vision, and Polidori’s presentation of what he described as her betrothed husband, and the destruction that their anticipated offspring would accomplish.

Trelawny’s face went blank and came to look much older as she spoke, and when she had finished, he stepped back and turned toward the river.

“I wonder what went wrong with Diamonds’s damned mirrors,” he said quietly. Then he added, “I should have put three or four rounds through old Gretchen right away.”

McKee caught Crawford’s eye and shrugged with one eyebrow.

Trelawny looked at Crawford. “I might … have been a bit out of breath. I had to do some running and jumping to get to where he was, you see.” He scowled again. “I doubt you could even have kept up with me.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Crawford agreed helplessly.

For several seconds the four of them stood there in the wind at the end of the ancient pier. From away up the street Crawford could hear the whickering drone of a hurdy-gurdy playing some Scottish-sounding melody.

“We thought—” began McKee.

“You did not,” snapped Trelawny. “Let me think.”

Johanna started to pick her nose, and McKee pulled her hand away.

“I know about this scheme to wreck London,” Trelawny remarked absently. McKee opened her mouth to ask something, but Crawford waved at her not to interrupt. Trelawny went on, “Miss B. did it once before, successfully — she’s out of the picture right now, but it seems that she had a — a child, so to speak, somehow…” His eyes widened. “Was Elizabeth Rossetti pregnant when she died?”

“I don’t know,” said Crawford.

“I’ll lay you pounds to pinfeathers she was. Such a child would be … well, I have no idea what it would be. But it wouldn’t be a subject of Miss B. or Polidori. Undead but never bitten! Knock either or both of them down and you wouldn’t stop it.” He bared his teeth and shook his head quickly, as if to dispel nausea. “And this thing wants to—marry! — have this offspring by! — Johanna?”

It seemed to be a rhetorical question. For another several moments the four figures stood silently on the pier.

“You should take her to America,” said Trelawny. “My daughter Zella and her husband moved there ten years ago, at my insistence and expense, and so my grandchildren are safe. The vampire things generally can’t cross that much salt water, unless you carry them along with you — as I did in ’33, necessitating my near-fatal swim across the Niagara River to get free of it.” He was chewing on a knuckle and frowning at Johanna. “Even France might be far enough. The Channel is a lot of water.”

“We might do that,” said McKee, surprising Crawford. “But is there anything … quicker? Something we could do today, tomorrow?”

This time Trelawny was silent for so long that Crawford wondered if the man had forgotten the question.

“There’s a certain crazy trick,” he said at last. “Have you ever heard of the translator men in St. Giles?”

McKee grimaced. “Devil worshippers, I’ve heard.”

“Not good Christians, certainly — not their clients, at any rate. But the trouble is that Miss Diamonds is a good Christian, and you’d need her cooperation — hell, you’d need her presence there. She should do it — she’s got amends to make, like us all — but it’d be wrong to tie her up and take her there by force.” He paused and then nodded. “Yes, that would be wrong.”

“Devil worshippers?” ventured Crawford.

“They make shoes to hide you from God,” said Johanna solemnly.

“That’s right, my dear,” said Trelawny. “And their clients pay a lot too, silly fools, to hide from somebody who’s not even there in the first place. But … if there were someone there, their trick might work.” He squinted at Johanna. “And you’re in a position where there is someone there to hide from.”

Crawford was frowning. “If you don’t believe God exists,” he began — Trelawny glowered but didn’t contradict him, so he went on—“then why do you have the Mud Larks baptized?”

Trelawny visibly restrained himself from throwing an angry glance at Johanna.

“Pascal’s wager,” he snapped. “Dunking them and saying the words is no trouble or expense, and if there should be a God, the Larks are thus benefited. If not, I’m nothing out of pocket. If baptisms cost a penny a shot, I wouldn’t bother.”

“I presume you’ve been baptized yourself, then,” Crawford went on.

Trelawny spat. “I won’t unmake who I am. If I thought there were more than a negligible chance of such a being existing, I’d get a pair of translator shoes myself.”

“How do they work?” asked McKee. “These shoes.”

“They don’t, Miss Rahab — they can’t, as I just now said. But what they aim to do is deflect — refract, reflect! — the special mutual awareness between redeemer and redeemed. Hah! To make the shoes, they use consecrated wine from a Catholic Church — what they believe is the blood of their Redeemer. I don’t believe people have a Redeemer … but Polidori surely has one, and with luck you can talk her into contributing some of her blood for a special pair of shoes — the blood she rubbed on him years ago to quicken him. With that blood fixed in your daughter’s shoes, your daughter will seem to his special sight to be just a stray reflection of the actual living Miss Diamonds.”

Crawford tried to imagine talking Christina Rossetti into cooperating in this. “Wouldn’t your blood work?” he asked. “You’re the — what did you say? — the Rosetta stone between the species?”

“Impersonally, at a distance — like the tidal effects of the sun compared to those of the moon. Miss Diamonds is Polidori’s immediate redeemer, by her personal blood.”

“You think, then,” said McKee dubiously, “that this has a chance of actually working?”

Trelawny pursed his scarred lips. “I’d be very surprised if it did. But I wouldn’t be … astonished.” He turned and began striding away from the river, toward the close pillars and the pavement of George Street.

Crawford raised a hand, intending to call him back, then just let his hand fall.

“So much for our ambush idea,” he said.

McKee shrugged. “We could do what Trelawny’s daughter did. Sail to America. Or France — Trelawny said that might do. The Magdalen Penitentiary might still front me money for passage, if I undertake to work it off as a domestic servant.”

“I could buy three tickets,” said Crawford, squinting thoughtfully. “To France, at least. And we’d want some money for food and lodging. I might need to convert some things to cash.”

“In the meantime,” said Johanna glumly, “there’s the blood shoes.”

“One way or another,” said McKee, “we need to talk to Sister Christina again.” She started to walk away in the direction Trelawny had taken, but Crawford caught her arm.

“If passage to America should be possible — or to France, I can certainly afford that — for the three of us here, you’d do it?” Suddenly he despised his own circumlocution, and he said directly, “Would you come with me, and leave Tom?” His heart was beating rapidly.

“Yes,” said McKee in a level tone, “if that would save Johanna.”

Crawford nodded. “Are you married to this Tom fellow?”

McKee raised her chin. “Common law.”

“Will you marry me? Properly?”

For several seconds, McKee didn’t speak. Crawford could peripherally see Johanna staring intently at them, but he didn’t take his gaze from McKee’s.

She looked away. “That would probably be necessary, for us to get travel documents with our child.”

Johanna exhaled audibly through her teeth.

“What I mean is,” persisted Crawford, “do you want to marry me?”

McKee looked at him almost angrily. “Do you want to marry me?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “As I have for seven years.” He was still holding her elbow.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, if you’ve got to have it said straight out. I still think you saw that in my head, then, in that tunnel.”

Johanna clapped her hands. “Oh, well done, you two.”

Crawford couldn’t take a deep breath, and just nodded. He took Johanna’s hand in one of his, and McKee’s in the other, and started walking back up the pier toward the pillars and the Strand beyond. McKee was looking only straight ahead, but she was holding his hand tightly.

“Where does Johanna sleep?” she asked finally. “At your house.”

“It’s been Mrs. Middleditch’s old room, on the second floor,” said Crawford. “You didn’t meet her, though, did you? But last night we both wound up in the basement, and I think I’m going to set up two beds down there, for now.”

“Could you set up a third bed? Over on Johanna’s side of the stove?”

“Easiest thing in the world,” said Crawford.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WASN’T ONE of Gabriel’s raucous dinners, with jokes and impromptu limericks flying back and forth under the two dozen candles in the Flemish brass chandelier — it was just family and Charles Cayley, whom William had invited mainly to discuss the handling of some ambiguous verbs in translating Dante — but Christina had excused herself after the soup and retired to one of the downstairs sitting rooms to lie down on the sofa under the big, ornately framed mirror.

She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece — ten o’clock, and though Maria would be getting tired, the men would probably go on talking until after midnight.

Of course it would not have occurred to poor William, lost in his merely voyeuristic concerns with literature, that Christina might find it awkward to sit down at dinner with Cayley, whose proposal of marriage she had refused three years ago.

He had been so earnest, that day in the parlor at the Albany Street house, and so disconcerted when she had gently told him that she couldn’t marry him!

She had been thirty-five years old then, and Cayley was surely the last suitor she would ever have — and she had always been very fond of him, and he virtually worshipped her. He had even managed to overlook what she knew he thought of as an element of coarseness in her, excusing it as an inevitable result of her charitable work among the prostitutes.

And her diabolical uncle had been, as far as she then knew, laid to permanent rest four years earlier — so there was no reason to fear having children … and she would have loved to have children.

Ultimately she had simply not considered it fair to Cayley, to marry him when she—

When she—

Go ahead, she thought now as she looked up at the mirror in Gabriel’s sitting room, admit it.

When she loved another.

But she was a good enough Christian to suppress and starve that love, and to pray that the object of it might somehow one day be saved from Hell.

She had convinced herself that she was glad, when they had laid Lizzie’s poisoning coffin over him; and she had convinced herself that she was horrified, five days ago, when it became clear that he had evaded the mirrors and risen from that grave.

She closed her eyes now, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Assume an attitude long enough, she told herself, and it will become your real one. But if only I had been permitted by circumstances to have a child! Even a niece or nephew — but her siblings were not likely now to have children either.

But, she thought, a child of my own—!

A soft thump on the Sarabend carpet made her open her eyes, and then she simply stared, disoriented.

This wasn’t another vision, for she was still in Gabriel’s sitting room — but a little boy was standing only a few feet away from her now, wrapped in one of Gabriel’s purple Utrecht velvet curtains.

Then she blinked and looked at him more closely — and sat up, alarmed and guilty, for he had clearly been long neglected — he appeared in fact to be near death from starvation: his wide bright eyes sat deep in the round sockets of his skull, and his mouth and nostrils looked like torn spots in a thin sheet of overstretched leather. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the lively attention in his eyes, she would have believed he was dead.

Her face and hands stung with a sensation that wasn’t tingling only because it was steady, and she was vaguely aware that her heart was pounding rapidly.

But — this must be the boy Gabriel described, she thought. His undead son, born from Lizzie’s dead body in the grave.

She didn’t even move, except to tilt her head back, when he sprang nimbly onto the back of the couch and, reaching up with his long gray tree-branch arms, draped the curtain over the corners of the big mirror; his arms seemed to stretch out even thinner, like taffy. Now he was wearing only a breechcloth made from one of Gabriel’s towels; his knees were the widest parts of his bone-thin gray legs, and his ribs stood out like ridges in eroded wood. The still air was rank with a smell of clay and loam.

Christina pushed back her suddenly damp hair with both trembling hands and tried to think. Gabriel had described the boy as dead, but perhaps he wasn’t, quite.

Then she noticed a flapping cut in the gray skin below his left ribs.

“Let me—” she burst out instinctively, “let me get you to a doctor!”

He looked as if he would have blinked at her, if his eyes were able to close, and she pointed a trembling finger at his side.

“I don’t bleed,” he said. His voice was a harsh quacking.

Perhaps the wound wasn’t as bad as it looked; certainly there was no sign of blood. “Then let me — at least — get you some—” she stammered, “something to eat.”

“You can’t sustain me now.”

“But you — what’s your name?”

“I haven’t got a name. I told you that when I drew you the pictures.”

Her right hand twitched, involuntarily. That’s right, she told herself — this is the thing we contacted last night, the thing that had no name and couldn’t spell. But he can’t be alive at all, if we contacted him at a séance!

Don’t make it angry, she thought cautiously as the perspiration beaded at her hairline. It doesn’t seem to be intelligent.

“What can I,” she began, and then the breath stopped in her throat.

A woman had stepped hesitantly into the room, groping as if blind, and Christina recognized her first by the long auburn hair that tumbled over her pale face and down her shoulders.

Christina sagged on the couch, as unable to move as if this were a nightmare.

“Lizzie,” she was able to whisper.

“No,” said the woman hoarsely. “Her spirit left this form long ago. And the one I have shared it with is gone now too — she is shrunken and hardened and stopped in a box of mirrors. I’m alone here.” Lizzie’s body tossed its head, throwing the lank hair back, and her heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on Christina. “I need you, my dear. Your mirrors broke me, and I’m not reassembled properly. I love you as I always have — give me your blood, and then you can do what is needed to restore me.”

“You’re,” said Christina softly, “you’re John, my uncle John, returned to me…”

For a moment the form of Lizzie Siddal wavered, and in the instant before it snapped back into focus, Christina glimpsed the remembered man’s face, the mustache and the lips and the melancholy eyes.

“All borrowed images,” came Lizzie’s scratchy voice, “but this woman’s image is less effort to maintain, to reflect light in, since my partner wore it so recently.” The visible body inhaled deeply, lifting the appearance of Lizzie’s bosom under the rotted black cloth of the dress. “Last night you refused me,” the voice went on, “but we weren’t alone. Do not refuse me now, when I need you so desperately.”

Christina glanced at the skeletal gray boy.

“He,” came Lizzie’s voice, and her face was actually smiling, “does not compromise ‘alone.’”

Algernon invited these two into this house, Christina thought. They have power here. Still, John doesn’t seem willing to simply force me.

“What,” she said carefully, “is needed to restore you?”

“Something like cross-pollenization,” said Polidori through the appearance of Lizzie’s mouth. “Something like sexual recombining of strengths.”

Christina’s heart was hammering in her chest, and she couldn’t speak.

“I need you to get the stone figure that is my physical self,” Lizzie’s voice went on, “and rub on it the blood of one of my partner’s subjects.”

“Your partner?” said Christina. My blood was good enough once, she thought, and then she smothered the thought. “That’s… Boadicea?”

“Yes, to the extent that I am Polidori. She is not me, and the blood of a subject of hers, charged with her essence, will convey her differentness to me. It will fill these present fissures in me with her unrelated vitality. I will be healed.”

“And soonly,” grated the nameless gray boy.

“Soonly,” agreed the Lizzie figure, swaying with evident weariness. “Blood is made in bones, and every particle of it only lives a hundred days before it dies. My partner is in no position to renew any of it now, and she was stopped five days ago, and the blood of her subjects was not newly imprinted with her essence even then.”

He’s talking as if it’s already agreed that I’ll let him have me now, Christina thought. Can I leap up and run out of here? To where?

No, she thought as her heart pounded and her breath came rapid and shallow, I’m not certain I can even get to my feet, and he or the boy would catch me in any case. There’s nothing I can do, nothing I can do.

She heard steps in the hall, and the bony gray boy darted to the far side of the couch and huddled himself below the arm of it.

“Whoever comes,” said the Lizzie apparition, “make them go, or we will kill them.”

Who is it? thought Christina. Whoever it is is only delaying the inevitable.

And it was Charles Cayley who shambled awkwardly into the room, some book in his hands, his bald head gleaming in the light of the one gas jet over the mirror.

“Oh!” he said, blinking at Christina on the couch and the figure of Lizzie standing on the rug. “I don’t mean to intrude. I was just…”

Christina stared at him, wondering if she dared wait out another of his interminable pauses. After several seconds, she said, “If you’ll excuse us, Charles, we’re having a confidential discussion.”

“Ah!” he said, bobbing his head and waving the book he carried. His face was red. “Certainly, excuse me, I—”

“I’ll say good-bye before we leave,” Christina interjected.

Still bobbing his head and mumbling polite inanities, Cayley turned and shambled out of the room. Christina recalled Gabriel’s judgment of him: The man’s an idiot.

The hideous gray skull face of the boy — Gabriel’s undead son — poked up from behind the arm of the couch.

“Soonly,” he said again in his flat voice.

“You love me still,” said the Lizzie thing, clearly smiling now, and for a few moments the figure was once more John Polidori, as darkly handsome as he had been in 1845, when she had been fourteen.

“That,” quavered Christina, “doesn’t settle the issue.” She made the sign of the cross, and the figure reverted to the appearance of Lizzie Siddal, who glanced at the gray boy for a moment before returning its attention to Christina.

“You sinned with me once,” it said. “God will not forgive that — give yourself to me, and never die, evade His judgment.”

“I think,” whispered Christina, though she was far from sure of it, “He will.”

“But I’m dying, your mirrors have broken me — will you condemn me to everlasting Hell, when you could heal me?” For a moment the face was Polidori’s again, and the eyes glittered with tears.

No, John, she thought, never!

But she found that she simply could not say it; instead, though it felt like a treacherous lie and it turned her stomach to say it, she answered, “He will forgive you too, whatever you are.”

“I can simply take you,” came its voice, sounding more crystalline than organic now.

The boy behind the couch shifted his feet, staring at her with his wide eyes.

“Possibly you can,” Christina whispered.

The figure of Lizzie glided toward the couch as Christina stared breathlessly up into its alien eyes — she seemed to be tilting forward, falling—

And then she grimaced involuntarily at a sudden, powerful reek of crushed garlic.

The face of Lizzie Siddal was just an array of curved planes and two glittering spots as it turned to Christina’s left.

Christina looked in that direction and saw Charles Cayley standing again in the doorway; his hands were trembling, but were now gleaming wet and bristling with yellow shreds.

The gray boy scampered to the river-side window — Cayley jumped in huge astonishment at his sudden appearance but held his ground — and the long gray fingers unlatched it, and when the boy had pushed it open, he and the Lizzie figure broke up into pieces like images viewed through a rotating kaleidoscope, and the pieces turned black and spun churning out through the open window.

Christina exhaled and found that she was sobbing silently.

Cayley stepped to the window and with shaking hands pulled it closed and latched it again.

“Charles,” Christina was able to say gaspingly, “I believe — you just saved my soul. I — should be grateful.” She took a deep breath, and then said, “How did you know to get garlic?”

Cayley blinked at her in evident bewilderment. “Well, she’s dead, isn’t she? I was at her funeral, you recall.” He smiled hesitantly, though his face was even paler than usual. “I couldn’t see you in peril and not try to save you.”

She almost said, I should have married you, Charles. But with her uncle John up again, she didn’t dare love anyone.

And, she thought, the original obstacle, God help me, probably still applies.

Gabriel’s harsh voice broke the moment: “What was Algy doing in the hall?” he asked, then frowned at Cayley’s hands. “What on earth—” He sniffed. “Is that garlic?” He glanced quickly at the closed window, and then at his sister. “What’s been going on here?”

“Lizzie,” she answered weakly, rubbing her eyes. “And that boy. Charles knew how to chase them away.”

“Really!” Gabriel looked at Cayley more closely. “That was good, Charles. I — that was good, thank you.”

Cayley began stammering out some reply, and Christina interrupted, “I think you could wash your hands now, Charles.”

Cayley nodded and hurried out of the room.

“Algy was in the hall?” said Christina. “I didn’t know.” She stretched and thought she could stand up now.

“Eavesdropping. William and Maria are ready to go home.” Gabriel seemed distracted. “Was anything important said here?”

Christina laughed weakly. “Oh, you know, just social pleasantries! Yes, some things were said. He wants—”

“Who, that boy?”

“No, it was Uncle John, in Lizzie’s form.”

She told him what Polidori had said about rubbing on his little statue the blood of one of Boadicea’s victims. “He didn’t know that you plan — we plan — to do exactly what he wants — at least to the extent of digging up the statue.”

Gabriel shuddered visibly. “We won’t do what he wants — no blood at all must get on the thing. Did Swinburne hear any of this? But you didn’t know he was there.”

He was snapping his fingers nervously. “It’s tomorrow night that Lizzie is to be exhumed. Charles Howell has arranged it with the Blackfriars Funeral Company. I’m supposed to wait at Howell’s house in Fulham while the exhumation goes on — Howell is to retrieve the poetry notebook and bring it to me there. But I’ve arranged with the funeral company to attend as a third gravedigger, hanging back as if to mind the carriage, and after Charles has left with the poetry notebook, I’ll bribe the other two to step away while I attend to Papa’s coffin. I’ll have a hammer and chisel — it shouldn’t take long.”

“And a knife,” said Christina. For Papa’s throat, she thought.

“Er, yes. And then — I think we ought to destroy the statue as soon as possible…?”

Christina stood up, staring at the window. “I suppose so.” Then she shook herself and caught Gabriel’s arm. “Yes,” she said, “the moment you’ve got hold of it.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I USED TO HATE sunlight,” remarked Johanna as she and Crawford and McKee hurried across Tottenham Court Road at the junction of Oxford Street on Thursday, dodging the horses pulling cabs and carriages. Now she had taken off her bonnet and shaken back her hair to let the afternoon sun shine on her face. “Now it’s like strong beer.”

Crawford gave McKee a worried glance. Johanna had had a glass of Mieux stout with her steak-and-ale pie, and he was hoping she wasn’t fated to be a drunkard — especially since they had decided to flee to France. Crawford had the idea that the French drank wine all day long.

Yesterday he had approached another London veterinary surgeon to negotiate selling his practice to the man, and they had agreed on a deal that involved the man taking over Crawford’s office and caring for the cats, and this morning Crawford had gone to Barclay’s Bank to arrange for a draft of all his savings and operating capital to be transferable to a bank in Paris.

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

But this errand was important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johanna and Crawford were both looking at McKee.

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

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

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

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

“She has, she has,” said Johanna.

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

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

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

“Tomorrow,” said the priest quietly to McKee.

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

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

“Do you recall the names?”

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

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

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

“I will,” said Crawford hoarsely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The glassy flesh shattered inward in a thousand pieces, and he picked among them, tossing them aside — and, deeper than he would have thought, he felt the rounded head of the little statue; he gripped it and pulled, and with a creaking and snapping and a shower of glassy throat fragments, the thing was free, and he was holding the little statue he had last seen on the high shelf in his father’s bedroom, back in the old house on Charlotte Street.

And there was a faint pressure in his mind, a flavor of greeting and promise.

Suddenly he was moving with feverish haste — he shoved the statue into his pocket and wedged the broken piece of wood back over the hole in the coffin and his father’s now crookedly uptilted face, and then he had gripped the grassy edge of the hole and pulled himself up and swung a leg up onto the surface, and a moment later he was lying on his back on the grass, panting so hard that he was blowing spit onto his goatee.

He rolled up onto his hands and knees. The gravediggers had taken their spades away with them, so with his hands he shoved piles of dirt down into the hole until he supposed any evidence of tampering must be concealed — he wasn’t going to actually look, for he could imagine the broken piece of wood knocked aside now and his father’s black face peering blindly up at him — and he got wearily to his feet.

All at once immensely tired and longing for his distant bed, he trudged to the lane and the steps down to the yard, where the gravediggers straightened up and knocked the coals out of their clay pipes and began trudging back up the steps with their shovels.

Now I’ve got to get to Howell’s house, Gabriel thought as he hurried to the rented Victoria carriage he had left tied up on the far side of the chapel, and convince him that I’ve been there all along — and if he’s there ahead of me, as is likely, I’ll claim I had to take a ride in the fresh air.

But I’ve violated my wife’s grave, and my father’s, and probably broken my dead father’s head right off. It will, he thought as he anticipated the self-loathing sure to come soon, take a powerful lot of fresh air to put some distance between me and the memory of this.

CHAPTER NINE

OH! I COULD never have done that,” said Christina with a breathless laugh. “But luckily there’s no need now.”

She leaned back in the forward seat of the hackney coach and smiled warmly at Crawford and Johanna and McKee, who were sitting on the opposite seat. Smells of cologne and damp wool filled the coach.

The traffic was not too badly congested on this rainy Friday morning, and the coach was rattling at a steady pace across the puddled intersection that was Oxford Circus, and Crawford, seated between Johanna and the right-side window, could see through the veils of rain down Regent Street past Jay’s Mourning Warehouse to the round, pillared façade of the Argyll Rooms.

Oxford Circus still looked more or less the way John Nash had designed it in the ’20s, and, what with Christina’s unexpected good news, Crawford let himself indulge in a reassuring sense of continuity.

We don’t have to go to France after all, he thought; I don’t have to sell my practice. Adelaide and Johanna and I will still be here a year from now. Ten years from now. Not eating frogs in France somewhere, thank God. Perhaps one day we’ll be going this way to attend Johanna’s wedding, and these awnings and rooftop windows and ranks of chimney pots will mostly still be here.

“Gabriel woke William last night and told him that he had found it,” Christina went on, “and by now I’m sure he has destroyed it.”

McKee smiled at her with her eyes nearly closed. “I got the impression he sleeps late.”

“Well,” allowed Christina, “soon he will have destroyed it, if he didn’t last night. He has all manner of hammers at his house, and he’s only two steps from the river. In any case, we don’t have to think about using my blood to make a pair of magical shoes!”

Crawford thought sourly that she might, now that it was apparently unnecessary, at least pretend that she would have gone to the trouble, if called on. She should do it, Trelawny had said two days ago; she’s got amends to make, like us all.

“I need to know that he’s done it,” said Johanna quietly. “And how he destroyed it.”

Christina sobered. “Of course, child — I’ll inform you all directly I know it’s done. He intends to pound it to powder and sift it widely into the river; it’s my uncle’s physical body, so that should certainly … unmake him.”

She seemed distracted then, and Crawford had to repeat his next question: “What’s become of the other one, the one Trelawny travels with?” The priest had said, one up, the other down.

“I believe she’s gone too, now,” said Christina. “My uncle appeared to me two nights ago, and he said that she was — how did he put it—‘shrunken and hardened and stopped in a box of mirrors.’ The way he was, for seven years, apparently.” She shook her head. “Queen Boadicea of the Iceni, shrunk to a pebble and locked in a box! I think it must have been Trelawny who managed to do it at last — Maria and I told him long ago how we stifled our uncle.”

The coach had passed the Oxford Music Hall — Crawford noted that the time on the clock was ten minutes to ten — and now swerved in to stop in front of the pub at the corner of Bozier’s Court.

Crawford levered open the coach door and stepped down to the pavement while opening an umbrella, and Johanna, in a new cambric dress and pink velveteen coat, hopped out right behind him; he reached a gloved hand up to help McKee down, and she too was wearing a new dress: blue silk with a hip-length cape. He remembered the enormous crinoline dress she had been wearing on the night they first met, and he was glad such things were apparently no longer in style — he would probably have had to hire a second coach.

Under a woolen overcoat he was wearing the formal frock coat he had bought seven years ago to replace the one he had lost in Highgate Cemetery. All three of them would have preferred to wear more ordinary clothing — McKee had said this church favored informality — but Christina Rossetti had insisted on buying the new clothes for McKee and Johanna.

Christina herself was clad in a woolen coat and plain brown muslin dress, as resolutely unfashionable as ever. Crawford took her hand as she carefully lowered one foot and then the other onto the wet pavement.

Once inside the church, they shed their damp hats and boots and overcoats in the vestibule and shuffled forward down the center aisle toward where Father Cyprian stood below the altar in the gray light from the stained-glass window above and behind him.

The only other person in the church on this rainy morning was old Christabel, who nodded and smiled when Crawford glanced at her. He waved uncertainly.

“The certificate is made out and the parish marriage-record book is ready to be signed,” said the priest, “so there’s no use delaying.” To Crawford he said, “Do you have a ring?”

“Yes.” In his waistcoat pocket he had brought along his mother’s wedding ring; he hoped it would fit McKee.

“Let’s—” began the priest, but he was interrupted by the squeak of the front door.

Crawford looked back and was somehow not very surprised to see the lean, white-bearded figure of Edward Trelawny in the doorway. The old man glanced around the dim interior and had begun to step back outside when he visibly recognized the people in the aisle.

He grinned and came in, pulling the door closed behind him, and when he had walked up to stand between Crawford and McKee he said, “Any of you know why a dead boy with a parasol should be anxious to get in here? I followed him up from Seven Dials.”

Johanna jumped, her eyes suddenly wide, and she exclaimed to Christina, “What if killing your uncle doesn’t kill the dead boy?”

“Clearly Gabriel hasn’t done it yet,” said Christina, though she was frowning.

“Ah!” said Trelawny. “This would be the phantasm who intends to marry you?”

Father Cyprian’s eyebrows were halfway up to his hairline.

Johanna was very pale, and Crawford took a firm hold of her upper arm.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“I showed him a pistol and he climbed away fast like a monkey up the side of this building. His arms stretch like gray rubber, don’t they?”

Christina’s lips were sucked in and her eyes were almost as wide as Johanna’s, but she nodded jerkily. “Yes,” she whispered, “they do.”

“You all here for last rites?” asked Trelawny.

“A wedding,” said Christina in a reproving tone.

“I’m marrying Medicus,” said McKee.

“You could do worse, I suppose.” He looked around the nearly empty church. “Who’s to give away the bride?”

“Nobody,” said McKee. “Ghosts.”

“I’d be happy to do it.”

Crawford and McKee both stared at the dark-faced, white-bearded old man with his permanently sneering scarred lips, and then they looked at each other.

“I suppose I have no substantial objection,” said Crawford.

“I’d be pleased, thank you,” said McKee.

“And,” said Father Cyprian, “if any dead boy should try to interfere in the ceremony, you can show him your pistol again.”

“I do that once,” said Trelawny cheerfully. “Next time I blow his grinning head off.”

“Don’t miss,” said Johanna.

“Miss!” said Trelawny, almost spitting. “Girl, I—”

“Dearly beloved!” interrupted the priest loudly; and then he went on in a conversational tone, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and”—with a wave toward Christabel—“in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”

Crawford stood up straighter and smoothed his damp hair and beard.

ALGERNON SWINBURNE HAD SEARCHED the whole of Tudor House, as well as he could — he had looked inside all the lacquered Japanese and Indian brass boxes that seemed to occupy every shelf, and peered behind all the stacked canvases, and stirred the salt and sugar jars with a knife. He had gone through every item in the drawers of the Elizabethan Spanish oak armoire in which Gabriel had once, as a joke, hidden a prized Nankin dish of Howell’s. But the statue the Rossetti siblings had talked about was not to be found. He wondered fretfully how big it might be — not too big to clog an old man’s throat, according to their story.

Gabriel must have it in his bedroom.

Swinburne glanced nervously toward the stairs. Gabriel suffered from insomnia, but in the mornings he did seem to be newly awake — blinking, distracted, grumpy. Perhaps he did all his actual sleeping in the few hours just before he got up, which was generally about noon.

I’ve got to risk it, Swinburne thought as he started up the stairs. If he awakens while I’m in his room, I’ll think of some excuse for being there.

It had been a full week since horrible old Trelawny had knocked Swinburne unconscious after their hasty sword fight, and Swinburne had had no contact with Miss B. since then. He was sure the ghastly old man had succeeded in capturing her in his mirrored box — and so Swinburne needed a new patron. For these last seven days, no verses at all had sprung into his mind, and it was like being color-blind, or … or insomniac. And there were physical effects too — during these last several days, his forehead seemed always to be damp with sweat, and his vision seemed blurred, and his hands shook no matter how much brandy he drank.

At the top of the stairs he took off his shoes and tiptoed in his stocking feet to Gabriel’s bedroom door, where he very slowly turned the knob; he lifted the door against the hinges as he swung it open.

The air was stuffy and stale. The windows that overlooked the back garden were heavily curtained, and the only light was a gray radiance through a closed window in the opposite wall. Swinburne could make out the vast mantelpiece, with its ivory-and-ebony crucifix, facing the mirror on a chest of drawers on the other side of the room and, between them on the broad figured carpet, the enormous old four-post bedstead.

Gabriel’s balding head could be dimly seen above the blankets, and he was breathing audibly enough for Swinburne to be confident that he was in fact asleep. Swinburne stole forward silently, peering about for Gabriel’s trousers or cloak so that he could rifle the pockets.

FATHER CYPRIAN LOOKED UP from his Book of Common Prayer and said, in a stern voice that echoed among the beams of the high ceiling, “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it.”

Crawford couldn’t remember if his wedding to Veronica twenty-five years ago had included this order; possibly Father Cyprian had added it specially after having dispensed with the three-week announcement of the banns.

Crawford hoped Trelawny wouldn’t do anything irresponsible; but the old man made no sound.

After what Crawford thought was a rudely prolonged pause, the priest went on, “John, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” said Crawford strongly.

The priest turned to McKee. “Adelaide, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

Crawford was reassured to hear happy firmness in McKee’s voice when she answered, “I will.”

The priest smiled. “And,” he went on, “who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

Peripherally, Crawford saw Trelawny take McKee’s arm and step forward.

“Take her from the hand of an unrepentant sinner,” Trelawny whispered to Crawford.

The priest cocked an eyebrow at the old man, and Crawford restrained himself from rolling his eyes. Shut up, he thought intensely.

It occurred to him that Trelawny’s statement was just reflexive bravado at finding himself on this rainy morning participating in a ritual in a Christian church; but he had mentioned sending his daughter and grandchildren to America, and seven years ago, in the cassowary cage at the London Zoo, he had said, I’ve been making amends for things I did in Greece, in Euboea and on Mount Parnassus, forty years ago.

And he baptized all the Mud Larks.

I don’t believe, thought Crawford, that you’re as unrepentant as you’d like us all to suppose, old man.

SWINBURNE FINALLY SAW GABRIEL’S trousers crumpled in the shadows by the foot of the bed — but as he began to crouch and reach for them, he saw the glass of water on the bedside table.

Something like a short black cigar was sunk in it.

He straightened very slowly, willing his knees not to pop, and took another long step forward and reached out with two fingers. The water was cold and faintly caustic, but he pinched the top of the thing — it did appear to be made of stone — and lifted it out of the glass.

And immediately he knew he had found the described statue, for he felt an alien eagerness and desperation in his mind.

Drops of water fell from it back into the glass with a sound like lightly plucked violin strings, and Swinburne closed his fist around the thing.

As carefully as he had made his way into the room, Swinburne began retracing his steps across the carpet. Now that he had hold of the thing, he was sweating with fear that Gabriel might awaken and take it away from him; but he was able to slide out through the doorway silently, and he turned and hurried down the stairs.

CRAWFORD TOOK HIS MOTHER’S ring out of his waistcoat pocket and slid it onto the fourth finger of McKee’s left hand, and then, prompted by the priest, he said, “With this ring I thee wed, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Trelawny yawned audibly, but when Crawford glanced at him, the old man looked away, as if interested in the framed stations of the cross paintings mounted high on the wall.

The priest was intoning some long prayer involving Isaac and Rebecca now, but Crawford was remembering Christina Rossetti saying that Trelawny had apparently “stopped in a box of mirrors” the woman he had met by moonlight in the Roman ruins of Watling Street years ago, and whom he had traveled with ever since.

Were the words of the wedding affecting him? Perhaps the love of those creatures for their victims, Crawford thought, is not always entirely unrequited.

The priest finished the prayer with “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” and Crawford said “Amen” along with McKee and the priest and Christina in a pew behind them.

Father Cyprian now took Crawford’s right hand and put McKee’s right hand into it; she laced her warm fingers through his.

“Those whom God hath joined together,” said Father Cyprian, “let no man put asunder. Forasmuch as John and Adelaide have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and thereto have given and pledged their troth, each to the other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving a ring, and by joining of hands; I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Crawford, McKee, Johanna, and Christina all echoed, “Amen.”

“That’s it,” said Father Cyprian, closing his book with a snap. “Since this is a somewhat rushed ceremony, I put the parish record book and the marriage certificate in the first pew.”

Crawford and McKee both signed the book, and Trelawny and Christina signed as witnesses, and when Crawford tucked the folded certificate into his waistcoat pocket, he remembered to give the priest fourteen shillings.

“Thank you,” said Father Cyprian, smiling crookedly. “Bless yourselves with holy water on the way out,” he advised, stepping back. “It might discourage your dead boy.”

Trelawny snorted. “I’ll bless him, with a silver bullet.” He turned to the others. “Where do you go from here?”

“Well,” said Christina a bit stiffly, “I’m going to go to my brother’s house, to make sure the statue is destroyed. Thank you, uh, Reverend!” she added, speaking past him.

The four of them had begun walking down the aisle toward the doors, but Trelawny stopped and caught Christina’s shoulder. “You people got it? The Polidori?”

“Yes,” said Christina, frowning as she glanced at his hand. “My brother retrieved it last night. And—”

“And you want to make sure it’s destroyed? It might not be?”

“Well, he … as Adelaide noted, my brother does sleep late…”

Trelawny started for the doors again, moving faster now but still clutching Christina’s shoulder.

“Where is it?” he barked as they stepped into the puddled vestibule. “Now?”

Everyone except Trelawny was snatching up coats and hats and umbrellas.

“At — at my brother’s house. Really, Mr. Trelawny, I must ask you to—”

Trelawny pushed one of the doors open and pulled Christina out into the cold alley air, with Crawford and McKee and Johanna following, tugging at hats and coat sleeves.

“Are there other people at that house?”

Stray drops of rain were finding their way down between the close-set buildings, and Christina blinked and tried to open her umbrella. “My brother William slept there last night — and Algernon Swinburne may be there, he often is—”

“Swinburne!” The name was an obscenity when Trelawny spat it out. “Does he know about this, about the statue?” Trelawny was marching them up the cobbles of Bozier’s Court toward the gray daylight of Oxford Street.

“No, I—” Christina hesitated. “Yes, I think he may. He was eavesdropping—”

“We’re all going to that house right now,” Trelawny pronounced, stepping right out into the street with Christina stumbling along beside him. She still hadn’t got her umbrella open, and the rain was coming down harder than before.

Trelawny flagged a passing clarence cab by practically blocking its way, and though the driver was making some protest about being engaged to pick up some other party, Trelawny released Christina to hop up beside the man and give him some money and say something to him, and the driver grimaced unhappily but nodded.

Trelawny glanced down, his eyes blazing above his white beard. “Where is your brother’s house?”

“16 Ch-Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea!”

Trelawny relayed the address to the driver, then sprang down to the pavement, yelling, “In, in!”

Johanna was the first one to scramble into the cab, and she seemed to share Trelawny’s sense of urgency — she reached out to grab her father’s hand and tug on it until he was sitting beside her. Trelawny was the last to step up into the cab, pushing McKee and Christina ahead of him.

The cab surged ahead as he pulled the door closed and sat down next to Crawford. Already the interior of the cab was steamy, and Trelawny smelled of cigar smoke.

“Swinburne!” Trelawny exclaimed again. “He needs it, needs your damned uncle — he’s been without a vampire patron for a week.”

“Swinburne?” exclaimed Christina. “He’s one of — the victim of one of these—”

“You’ve read his poetry,” said Trelawny bitterly.

“I should have known,” she whispered.

“Assuredly you should have, if in fact you didn’t.”

Christina was apparently too distracted to take offense. “He was one of… Boadicea’s?”

“Of course. And I caught her just as you said, shortly before dawn last Saturday, poor old girl.”

“He wants,” said Christina, trying now to collapse her partly opened umbrella, “my uncle wants someone to rub the blood of one of Boadicea’s victims onto his statue. Our mirror trick, though it didn’t keep him down forever, did evidently damage him — and now he needs blood vivified by another of his kind — I—didn’t catch why.”

“She infects the victim with her blueprint,” said Trelawny with a shrug. “I suppose the victim’s blood could impose her blueprint on your uncle’s fractured self — let him re-knit, like a shattered bone, according to its directions.”

Johanna leaned out from beside Crawford. “I’ll kill myself,” she remarked, “before I’ll let him have me again.”

“You shame me,” Christina said to her softly.

For several seconds no one spoke, as the cab rattled down Charing Cross Road toward the Strand.

“Congratulations, incidentally,” said Trelawny to Crawford, reaching over to shake his hand.

“For what?” asked Crawford absently, shaking the old man’s hand as he stared at his daughter.

“You just got married,” put in McKee with a dry smile.

“Oh! Oh, yes, of course, thank you. I’m distracted by—”

Trelawny nodded and fished a flask from under his coat. “The pleasant times are always soon eclipsed.” He unscrewed the cap and waved it around at the company.

Christina was the first to take it, and she took a solid gulp.

To Crawford’s alarm, McKee declined it but passed it to Johanna; and when his daughter handed it to him, it felt only about a third full. It proved to contain neat brandy, and he was careful not to drink all that was left before handing the flask back to Trelawny, but the old man took only a token sip before recapping it.

For perhaps a couple of minutes they were silent in the rattling, rocking cab, and then Christina remarked, “He’s not restored yet; I’d feel it if he were. Perhaps Gabriel hid it effectively.”

Beside Crawford, Johanna nodded. “I’d feel it too, and I don’t.”

For the rest of the ten-minute ride, none of them spoke — they all simply stared out the rain-streaked windows at the passing dark buildings on the right and the leaden river on the left as the cab shook its way through Westminster and Pimlico.

At last the cab squeaked to a halt in front of a closely barred wrought-iron fence, beyond which stood a three-story red-brick house with projecting bay windows on the first and second floors.

Trelawny was first out of the cab, and he shouted at the driver to wait for them.

As the rest of them disembarked from the cab, Christina was saying something about going in first alone, but her four companions hustled her through the gate and across the walkway and up the five steps to the front porch.

“We need to settle it as soon as possible, Diamonds,” said Trelawny, not unkindly, as he waved at the doorknob.

Christina lifted her handbag but tried the knob with her free hand, and the door proved to be unlocked.

“You all can wait in the west sitting room—” she began, but Trelawny had already started down the hall. He paused in front of the dining-room door, for stairs led away both to the right and to the left, and he waved from one to the other impatiently.

“You must wait,” Christina said. “I’ll go up and get him—”

Trelawny looked over her shoulder at Crawford. “You take the left and I’ll take the right. Yell when you find his bedroom.”

“To the right, to the right,” said Christina desperately, “but let me lead!” She stepped around Trelawny and started up the circular staircase. “I can’t have you all bursting into every room!”

Her companions were on her heels as she led them up past the windowed first-floor landing to the second, and then they followed her down another hall to a closed door.

Christina rapped on it. “Gabriel? It’s Christina—”

Trelawny gripped her shoulders and moved her aside and opened the door. A moment later all five of them stood beside Gabriel’s four-post bed, panting.

Gabriel was sitting up in the bed, blinking in evident astonishment. A small window beyond him let in the gray daylight.

“Trelawny,” he muttered sleepily, “and — and the prostitute—”

Crawford exhaled sharply and started forward, but Trelawny threw an arm out sideways to block him. “No time,” he snapped at Crawford, and to Rossetti he said, “The lady is this man’s wife, you pig. Where is the—”

Crawford was staring angrily at the befuddled goateed face of Gabriel Rossetti, but he felt Christina shiver violently beside him; and in the same moment Johanna moaned and sat down on the carpet. The bird in McKee’s handbag emitted a shrill squeak.

“We’re — too late,” gasped Christina. “Algy has blooded the statue.”

At this Gabriel turned toward the table beside his bed, and he gave a wordless cry of dismay and snatched up a glass from it.

Water or gin splashed on his blankets as he held it up in front of his face.

“Is this empty, ’Stina?” he demanded. “I can’t see.”

“There’s only water in it,” she answered harshly. “Salt water, I suppose. Algy has—”

And then there were suddenly two new figures blocking the window on the far side of the bed, and Crawford snatched up Johanna and turned toward the door.

The door slammed shut before he could reach it. He shifted the girl in his arms and tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn and the door wouldn’t shift at all, and he turned to face the two shapes.

The one closest to the window he had seen before: its head was a yard-wide flat disk with a mouthful of teeth that extended around the rim as far as he could see, and it had no eyes; the other was clearly the skeletal gray boy Johanna had described three nights ago — his temple and cheek were lit by the window at his back and were as hollowed as a skull’s.

Gabriel roared in fright and rolled out of the bed onto Christina’s feet, taking the blankets and the bedside table down with him; Christina lurched backward into Crawford, and salt water splashed across the carpet. Johanna scrambled out of Crawford’s arms and looked around the room wildly.

The room shook, as if at the impact of Gabriel hitting the floor; Crawford hopped to keep his balance.

The flat-headed thing’s mouth opened, all the leathery way across, and the remembered whispery voice said, “My daughter, I have brought your bridegroom to you. Consummation, now, at last — and then, soon, the offspring.”

The dead boy made a hissing sound and flexed his long fingers in the gray light.

Crawford glanced at Johanna, who had retreated into the corner by the fireplace and was gripping a poker; her eyes were wide, and her lips were pulled back from her teeth. The floor still seemed to be swaying, and Crawford stumbled as he stepped in front of her and lifted a long fire iron.

But McKee had pulled a jar of minced garlic out of her handbag, and now twisted it open; the smell instantly filled the room.

“Sulfur,” she said hoarsely, “and the agent that stops you binding to our spiral threads, you — shit wagon!”

The dead boy’s fingers closed into knobby fists and he made a hooting sound, but the wide-mouthed creature flickered, in one moment seeming to be Gabriel’s wife and in the next the mustached man Crawford had seen in the skull chamber under Highgate Cemetery seven years ago.

McKee whirled the jar in an arc, scattering wet yellow shreds across both figures; and immediately they lost all form, becoming churning black shapes; and a moment later the window exploded outward and they had funneled away through it.

Crawford rushed to the window and squinted against the rainy breeze. Two hunched figures in flapping black were hurrying away down the street below, both huddled under a ragged white parasol. Even as he watched, they diminished in size far more rapidly than their pace could justify, and then they seemed to merge with the river-side trees and disappear.

The floor was steady.

Crawford heard a clank behind him and turned to see that Johanna had dropped the poker. He dropped the fire iron he was holding, and then Johanna was in his arms.

“Were you going to keep it?” screamed Christina at her brother.

“I was—” Gabriel disentangled himself from the bedclothes and stood up. He was barefoot, wearing a long nightshirt, and he quickly picked up a pair of trousers from the floor, and then squinted around as if wondering where he might get dressed. “I was going to pulverize it today. I—”

Trelawny had found a pencil and an envelope, and he scribbled something and then shoved the envelope into Crawford’s hand.

“Come sundown,” said Trelawny, “he’ll be back, stronger, and he’ll block your garlic then. Here’s where you can get the shoes for your daughter.” He gave Christina a ferocious glare. “You must go with them. They’ll explain why on the way.”

Christina nodded wearily, her anger at Gabriel exhausted. “I know why. Yes, I–I must go with them.”

To McKee, Trelawny barked, “You know the crossing sweeper who takes only a ha’penny?”

“Yes.”

“Pass through the eye of his needle.”

“Shoes?” said Gabriel, still holding his trousers and peering from the broken window to the empty glass on the carpet and back.

“Go back to bed,” said Trelawny. He turned the knob, and the door opened readily now.

CHAPTER TEN

THE CAB TOOK Crawford, McKee, Johanna, and Christina almost all the way back to the church, but McKee had the driver let them out a couple of streets east and south of it, at the stone circle in the center of Seven Dials.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been here,” said Christina breathlessly as Crawford led them, running and pausing, through the ever-shifting maze of horses pulling carriages and wagons.

“I should hope not,” said McKee, pulling Johanna up onto the Earl Street curb.

Crawford opened his umbrella and handed it to Johanna, who was yawning as if to pop her ears. “I can still feel his attention on me,” she said.

Christina was panting. “So can I.”

The overcast sky had a faintly brassy color from the haze of coal smoke, and the streets between the wedge-shaped buildings that ringed the circle were in deep shadow. Even in the rain the pavements were crowded — disreputable-looking young men in shapeless caps and old women in shawls slouched near at hand under the shop awnings, and men in overcoats hurried past under umbrellas. Johanna’s pink velveteen coat and McKee’s blue silk dress stood out in the drab crowd.

McKee stood up on her toes to look around among the bobbing hats and umbrellas all around them, and at last she said, “I see him,” and started forward, still holding Johanna’s hand.

Crawford followed behind Christina; she was taking short, scuffling steps, and he hoped their quest wouldn’t involve too much walking.

Traffic in the next radius street was simply stopped, the drivers shouting and shaking their fists, and McKee led her group through the mud between the halted horses to the far side of it.

A crossing sweeper was busily establishing a path between a high-piled furniture wagon and a couple of hansom cabs, waving his broom at the drivers as much as using it to sweep the puddles aside, and a couple of timid-looking men in bowler hats tottered behind him across the wet gravel. At the far curb the old sweeper looked back, and he nodded when McKee waved her hat at him. A moment later he came scampering back between the wheels and hooves so nimbly that Crawford was startled to get a better look at him.

Under a floppy hat, the man’s hair was sparse and white, and his face sagged in deep wrinkles — but his eyes were alert and merry.

He didn’t seem to be at all winded. “A ha’penny to cross,” he told McKee.

McKee tugged on Crawford’s sleeve. “Give him a shilling,” she said quietly, “and tell him you want it all back.”

This felt like some kind of ritual, so Crawford did as she said; and the old man gave them all a reappraising look but nodded cheerfully and handed Crawford two sixpences in exchange for the shilling, a transaction that made the old man no profit at all.

“Like that, is it?” he said, and then without waiting for an answer he scuttled to the doorway of a nearby druggist’s and left his old broom there and came back with another.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” he said, and paused as if for a reply.

“Er,” said Crawford, “but the old broom—”

“—Knows all the coroners,” finished McKee.

Crawford had handed his umbrella to Johanna, and in their haste he had left his hat at Gabriel Rossetti’s house; and now he wanted to spit out the coconut taste of macassar oil in the rainwater running down his face from his hair.

But before he could complain about the delay, McKee seized his hand and pushed Christina, and then they were all sprinting across the muddy gravel — glancing back to make sure Johanna was following, Crawford saw that the old man was right behind her, sweeping so furiously that muddy gravel as well as sprays of water flew to the sides. On the far side of the street McKee gathered the others up onto the curb.

“Till the rain stops, I reckon” the old man said, “and no more’n a hundred yards.” He was not even panting as he touched his hat brim; and then he was hurrying back through the river of vehicles to where he had left his ordinary broom.

“It’s about noon,” said McKee, “and our footprints have been erased. Are you still with us, Sister?”

Christina had been leaning against a post-box, but now she took a deep breath and stepped away from it and took a fresh grip on the handle of her umbrella.

“I used to walk for miles,” she said, “when I was a little girl.” She tilted her head, as if listening. “And I don’t feel his attention!”

Johanna held her hand out in the rain from under the gleaming umbrella. “I don’t either, right now.”

McKee nodded. “On to Dudley Street.”

“I’ve heard of Dudley Street,” Johanna said.

“It’s good enough in the daytime,” said McKee, starting forward, “though I’d have had us dress less grand.”

Their way led them down a narrow side street where children and goats huddled in the shelter of eaves far overhead, and open doorways let out gruff voices and the smells of beer and dubious cooked meats, and then McKee guided them down a cross street to the left.

The houses on this street were all of blackened brick with haphazard ironwork over the windows, and a lone hansom cab moving down it was having to proceed slowly because of the multitude of shirtless boys kicking a ball around in the rain; they had marked out some intricate pattern on the street in white stones and seemed to be trying to kick the ball in a particular zigzag course across it.

Crawford noticed the recessed squares in the pavement only when he saw McKee crouch beside one, her blue silk dress trailing in the puddles, and wiggle a short pole that stood up from it.

After a moment a square of brown canvas was pulled aside from below, and Crawford saw that it had blocked a hole, and a squinting bearded face was now peering up out of it.

“We need translator shoes,” McKee said, leaning forward to politely hold her umbrella over the hole. “The hide kind.”

Crawford thought most shoes were made of hide, but the man seemed to comprehend a distinction.

“Farther up the street, under the shrouded cross,” he said, jerking his head to the east, “for hiding shoes. And may God have mercy on you.”

The bearded head withdrew down the hole, and the canvas cover was fumbled back into place and secured again from below.

Christina glanced up and down the unsavory street. “Perhaps this isn’t a good idea after all,” she said timidly.

“We’re bringing your blood,” said McKee, straightening up, “not God’s. Come on.”

But two of the boys who had been playing ball stepped in front of McKee now, and Crawford saw that they were older than the others — their cheeks were lined, and their chins were dark with whiskers.

“You two,” said one of them, pointing at Christina and Johanna, “you got the smell of stony blood on you.”

The other boy pulled what appeared to be a rough oval stone out of his pocket, and Crawford stepped in front of Johanna — but when the boy held it out on his palm, Crawford saw that it was some sort of oyster.

Rain was still thrashing down onto the puddled gravel of the street. The oyster opened, and a hollow voice clearly came out of it: “Some of your blood,” it said.

The skin of Crawford’s face seemed to tighten, and he found that he and his companions had all taken an involuntary step back.

“They’ve got a ghost in that oyster,” said McKee. Crawford noticed that her knife was in her hand, and then he saw that Johanna had drawn her own blade from under the pink velveteen coat — but the two boys now pulled knives of their own from the backs of their waistbands.

“We heal fast when Mister Clammo gets fresh stony blood,” said the boy with the oyster in his free hand.

Crawford braced himself to spring at the boys and try to block their blades with his gloved hands, but Christina Rossetti stepped forward — and pursed her lips and began to whistle.

Even in this tense crisis, the whistled melody jarred Crawford with its abrupt changes of key and its apparent distortions of some long-familiar tune…

No one moved as the shrill notes batted between the close black housefronts, and the only thought Crawford could hang on to was the bizarre idea that the very raindrops were halted in the air overhead.

And the oyster convulsed right out of its shell and fell with a tiny splash at the boy’s feet. The rain came hammering down.

The boy crouched to pick up the limp white thing, while his companion stepped back uncertainly.

“Be damned,” said the first boy. “It’s dead!”

“Yes,” agreed Christina with a cold smile. “And I know more stopping melodies. Shall I whistle another?”

The first boy let the white blob fall to the mud again, and then both of them were running away.

McKee and Johanna had tucked their knives away, and McKee was again leading the way forward.

“Where did you learn that?” she muttered over her shoulder.

Christina was stepping along at a more lively pace now. “From the girls at the Magdalen,” she said breathlessly. “After your time, it may have been.”

“Who … wrote that terrible music?”

“Nobody seemed to know.” Christina shrugged. “Some mute, inglorious Merlin.”

“That must be the shrouded cross,” said Johanna, her hand pointing ahead from under her umbrella.

Crawford looked in that direction and saw what at first appeared to be a wet cloth kite hanging from an old iron bracket high up on a brick wall, and a moment later he realized that it was a large crucifix draped in clinging linen.

In the street at the foot of the old lightless house was another of the canvas-blocked holes.

Johanna tilted back her umbrella and looked through narrowed eyes at Christina. “You and I should flip a coin,” she said. “Both of us need to hide from him.”

Christina raised her shoulders in a shiver, and McKee said, “No, a reflection of Sister Christina attached to her wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

“But it was a generous thought,” said Christina.

McKee crouched and again wiggled a post beside this canvas cover, and this time, since they were farther away from the street-ball game — ominous in memory now, with its arcane patterns — Crawford heard a bell clang somewhere below the canvas.

Grimy fingers poked up from under the canvas, and a moment later it had been pulled aside to reveal a lean, bone-pale face and magnified eyes blinking behind two pairs of spectacles, one jammed in front of the other.

“You be wantin’ to hide from God?”

“A god,” said McKee. “We brought our own Eucharist.”

The face bobbed. “There’s still a corkage fee.”

The man tucked the cover aside and scuffed back down a ladder, out of sight.

Crawford shrugged out of his frock coat and laid it in the mud beside the square hole, then knelt on it and felt around with his boots for the top rung of the ladder; when he found it, he grinned reassuringly at Johanna and began climbing down; and as the gray daylight above was cut off, replaced by flickering lamplight from below, he was uncomfortably reminded of the tunnels under Highgate Cemetery.

The cellar floor was spongy wood planks that made sucking sounds when he stepped away from the ladder to give McKee room, and a mismatched couple of kerosene lamps on a low table threw a yellow glare across shelves of boots and shoes, all very well worn. Hammocks were hung on the other side of the chamber, and Crawford saw several wide-eyed children in them gaping at him. A dozen crude straw dolls, perhaps the work of the children, were hung at various heights from the uneven ceiling and jiggled in the windless stale air.

After McKee, Christina climbed carefully down the ladder, her handbag swinging, gasping as each boot found a new rung and then not feeling for the next until her other boot had been firmly planted beside it. When at last she stood on the yielding wooden floor, she sighed deeply and wrinkled her nose at the ammonia-and-curry smell of the cellar.

Johanna came hopping down last, holding Crawford’s muddy coat.

All their clothes were dripping, but Crawford didn’t see that it would matter here.

“I’m known as Beetroot,” the man said cheerfully. “I don’t want to know who you people are.”

“We need a pair of shoes for the girl,” Crawford said. He was watching the hanging dolls and found that he was nearly whispering. “And the, the wine to prime them with is”—he went on, gesturing at Christina—“in her veins.”

“Oh? Oh!” The man frowned and took off both pairs of spectacles and then put them on again, reversed, and he waved the spread fingers of both hands rapidly in front of his face and peered at Christina and Johanna through the shaking fans of them. Finally he lowered his hands and said to Christina, “Which one did you redeem?”

“Which … one?” she asked weakly.

“There are only two sustaining originals, darling,” Beetroot said.

Christina glanced at Crawford, who shrugged and nodded, and then she looked down at the soggy floor. Very quietly, she said, “The, uh, male one.”

“Ah, the male one,” said Beetroot, “the European one! Yes, I’ll take a measure more of blood than ordinary, enough to make three pairs. No, four pairs, counting the pair for your girl.” He rubbed his bony hands together. “I’ll have my brats wear the others, to keep ’em from cooling off until I can sell them. People postpone hiding from God, or argue about my price for it, but I know three people who will pay quite a lot to hide from him.” He grinned at Crawford. “The cost to you will be much less.”

“No,” said Crawford, “this woman isn’t a — a cask for you to draw from! I’ve got money, I’ll pay for the standard—”

“You haven’t got as much as these fellows will pay, I assure you.” The man’s eyes rolled behind the doubled lenses.

Crawford opened his mouth to argue, but Christina shook her head at him and gripped Johanna’s shoulder. “I owe it,” she said.

Crawford sighed. “How much do I pay?”

“Since you’re providing me with surplus product,” said Beetroot judiciously, “make it one ha’penny — just enough so that you’ve committed yourself.”

Crawford dug in his pocket and gave the man a ha’penny coin. Committed myself, he thought — to what, in whose record?

The man turned away and opened an incongruously polished wooden box on the table by the lamps and lifted out a little silver bowl, a short wooden stick, and a tool like a screwdriver with a small perpendicular flange half an inch from the pointed tip.

A fleam and a bloodstick and a bleeding bowl, thought Crawford, much like what I’ve got back home in my surgery!

“I thought you ordinarily worked with consecrated wine?” he asked suspiciously.

“True, lad, but I needs must mix it every time with the blood of a man born in the river, underwater.” He had laid the tools down now and begun to roll up his ragged sleeve, and he held his right arm out toward Crawford. The inside of his elbow was hatched with white scar tissue. “Such as myself. Collision on the river in ’25—my mother drowned, but they saved me.” The man looked up at him and grinned. “Ordinarily I charge a good deal more than a ha’penny for this.” He turned toward the hammocks and called, “Andrew! Come tap the fleam!”

Christina was staring wide-eyed at the blade of the fleam, and she wasn’t reassured when a barefoot child came slapping up and picked up the instruments with grimy hands.

“Wait, I can do it,” said Crawford hastily, “for you and the lady here. I’ve done phlebotomies on more horses than there are men in the moon.”

“And I’ve had phlebotomies,” said Christina faintly. Her eyes fixed on Crawford’s. “Yes, I’d rather you did it.”

Andrew immediately returned to his hammock, and Beetroot shrugged.

“Johanna,” said Crawford, “can you hold the bowl?”

“Certainly,” she said, picking it up. She seemed brightly interested in the whole procedure.

More to reassure Christina than from consideration of the man’s health, Crawford lifted the glass chimney from one of the lamps and held the fleam blade in the flame until it was black; then he replaced the chimney and waved the blade in the air for a few moments to cool it off.

“Er… Adelaide,” he said, “would you hold his elbow out?”

McKee gripped Beetroot’s arm with both hands, presenting the inside of the elbow. The man was grinning, apparently at the unprecedented elaborateness of it all.

Crawford held the blade up, squinting at it. “You might not want to watch, Miss Christina.”

“Squeamishness,” she said, “is one thing I don’t suffer from.”

“Is there any liquor?” Crawford asked. “To clean the skin,” he added when Beetroot gave him an impatient look.

“Oh. Bottle of gin under the table.” The man laughed. “Clean the skin, is it!”

“Johanna, if you would. A splash on his elbow right over the vein, and then scrub it a bit with your handkerchief. And then hold the bowl under.”

The girl did as he said, afterward absently tipping the bottle up for a mouthful before setting it on the table. The sharp juniper smell filled the cellar, and the straw figures hanging from the ceiling seemed to dance more vigorously in the still air.

Crawford tried to ignore the crude dolls. He laid the pointed tip of the fleam against the scarring over the man’s median orbital vein, and then tapped the handle with the bloodstick — being careful to do it very lightly, for he was used to doing this on the neck of a horse, with a coat of coarse hair to get through.

Immediately a line of dark blood ran down and began puddling in the silver bowl Johanna held.

“Andrew!” called Beetroot. “Come watch as he does it to this woman. This is how you do it, not like you’re driving a nail!” After several seconds, he unfastened a pin one-handed from his shirt and deftly poked it through the cut in his pale skin, and then folded his arm. “That’s plenty.”

Crawford took the bowl from Johanna and tilted it toward the lamplight — the blood in it was staying dark, not reddening in the air.

The man laughed, straightening his arm now and looping a length of thread around the pin in his elbow. “Trust a medical man to notice that! Always happens, with people born under the Thames — we’re partly dead, drowned, always.” He looked past Crawford at Christina. “And now the wine.”

Christina stepped forward across the mushy boards but just gave Crawford a stare and didn’t roll back her sleeve yet.

He nodded and wiped the fleam blade, then again lifted the lamp chimney and carefully turned the blade in the flame.

“Johanna,” he said, “gin again, but just for the elbow this time, eh?”

Christina rolled up her sleeve and handed Johanna a fresh handkerchief, and Johanna poured gin on it and then swabbed Christina’s elbow.

Crawford was aware of young Andrew standing beside him as he gently tapped the fleam against the soft skin of Christina’s inner elbow, and he was glad to see that she didn’t even wince as the blood flowed around her arm and dripped rapidly into the bowl Johanna was holding.

From the corner of his eye, Crawford saw that the straw dolls were hanging motionless now. “You’ve got the attention of all the children,” said Beetroot, nodding.

When Crawford judged that several tablespoonfuls had run into the bowl, he reached for the handkerchief Johanna was holding, but the man caught Crawford’s wrist.

“Not yet.”

Christina just closed her eyes as more of her blood sluiced around her elbow and fell into the bowl.

After another thirty seconds, Crawford took the handkerchief from Johanna, and the man nodded reluctantly.

“I suppose that’ll do.” He pointed to another pin in his shirt, raising his eyebrows, but Christina shook her head and just wrapped the gin-soaked handkerchief around her elbow and then folded her arm to hold it tightly.

“Smooth work,” she said to Crawford.

Beetroot took the bowl from Johanna. “Laces, now, laces!” he exclaimed, snatching up several lengths of string from the table and stirring them with his fingers into the mixed blood.

“Shoes, Andrew, shoes!”

The boy sprang to the shelves and tucked several pairs of shoes under his arm, then crouched beside Johanna and held them up one by one beside her right foot.

“These,” he said, straightening up with a battered pair of high-topped black shoes.

Beetroot dredged one string out of the blood and handed the dripping thing to the boy. “You’ve got the left shoe, you’re clockwise,” he said.

And then the two of them were threading the strings through the lace-grommets of the shoes in a peculiar spiral pattern rather than the ordinary crisscross progression. Crawford saw that the man was stringing the right shoe counterclockwise. The dolls jiggled excitedly overhead.

At last Beetroot and Andrew tied careful knots in the middles of the spiral patterns.

“Here,” Beetroot said, thrusting toward Johanna the shoe he had prepared as Andrew handed her the other. “These’ll be a bit loose, since you’re not to untie them, ever. Stuff ’em with rags to make ’em fit. Shoes!” he yelled to Andrew, fumbling in the blood for more strings. “You people can go,” he said, his attention now on the next pair of shoes, and the two pairs after that.

“Put them on now,” McKee told Johanna. “While we’re still underground and it’s still raining.”

Beetroot looked up from stringing a fresh shoe and nodded.

Johanna’s nostrils flared in distaste as she looked at the ugly old shoes and the bloody laces in them, but she handed them to McKee and then braced one hand against the wall to take off her boots.

Crawford picked up his muddy coat and dug out his handkerchief, and he gave it to Johanna to stuff into one of the shoes; then, after glancing around, he unbuttoned the collar from his shirt and handed it to her for the other one.

“Thanks,” said Johanna as she fitted her stocking feet into the hiding shoes. She glanced around at her companions. “We all looked better at the wedding an hour ago, didn’t we?”

“It’s been a disheveling day,” Crawford agreed, thrusting his arms through the sleeves of his soggy coat.

Johanna waved back at the room, though the jiggling of the hanging dolls seemed to be the only response.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Crawford, taking her arm and turning her toward the ladder.

He went first up the old wooden rungs, but the few people on the street, huddled in doorways against the rain, only glanced at him incuriously. He waved the rest of his party up, and in a few minutes McKee had led them to the more populated expanse of Earl Street, where she turned left, back toward Seven Dials.

Johanna was limping, but when Crawford gave her a concerned look, she told him, “I’ve worn worse, I’ll get used to them.” Then she grimaced up from under the umbrella. “But do I sleep in them?”

“I — don’t know,” he said.

Johanna shrugged and kept walking. “That boy Andrew didn’t look well, did he?” she said after a few more paces. “I bet soon there’ll be another straw doll.”

Hurrying along beside them, Christina whispered something that might have been a phrase from a prayer.

The rain trailed to a stop just as they emerged into the irregular square at the junction of the seven streets, and a stray beam of sunlight flickered across the circle in the center, momentarily visible between wheels and horses’ legs.

Christina had rolled her wet sleeve down again, and a stain of blood showed at her elbow, but she didn’t seem to have any trouble walking, and they would be able to flag a cab here.

Then she halted and touched her throat and brushed her face as if she’d walked through a spiderweb. Crawford caught Johanna by the hand and asked, anxiously, “Miss Christina? Are you well?”

She managed an unhappy smile. “As well as I ever am. We seem to have reestablished our footsteps — his attention is on me again.”

Crawford glanced quickly at Johanna, who tentatively spread her fingers and sniffed the air. “Not on me,” she said softly. Then, more loudly, “He’s not watching me!”

“Yes,” said Crawford, starting forward again and peering around for a cab, “you sleep in them.”

And it looks as if we’re going to France tomorrow after all, he thought.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WILLIAM AND MARIA were at Tudor House when Christina arrived there at one thirty in the afternoon. Gabriel was sitting at a small table by the bay window in the long drawing room upstairs, cradling a moldy notebook in his hands and looking out over the river, when young Henry Dunn showed her in, and William and Maria stood in the far corner of the room, whispering.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed William, stepping around the long table. “You’re all wet and muddy! Did you fall somewhere?”

“I was saving a girl from our uncle,” Christina said, “for a while, at least.” She walked up to Gabriel and waved toward William and Maria. “Have you told them?”

He looked up at her blankly, but Maria said, “We know the statue is not yet destroyed — Gabriel has misplaced it here in the house somewhere.” She was staring at Christina’s dress. “I thought you were going to a wedding! Did you get in a fight?”

“I had to climb down a hole in a street in St. Giles, and”—pointing at her stained sleeve—“lose some blood.”

Maria drew in a breath with a hiss, and Gabriel looked away.

“Algy didn’t take it,” he said. “I asked him.” He idly flexed the old notebook in his hands, and bits of the cover flaked off in his lap.

“You’ve read his poetry,” Christina said witheringly, echoing Trelawny.

Gabriel shrugged.

William cleared his throat. “We think Gabriel may have misremembered where he put it last night. I should have helped him hide it, after he woke me and told me he had retrieved it. But I just said, ‘Good,’ and went back to sleep.”

Gabriel nodded. “I had a lot to drink before I finally went to bed. Understandable, I think, under the circumstances.”

Christina’s mouth was open in astonishment, and she said to him, “But you saw those two creatures this morning! — you saw them appear! — in your bedroom! And you must—”

“They’ve appeared in this house before,” interrupted Gabriel irritably.

Christina looked out the window, and after a moment she pointed to a passing wagon. “And what is that?” she demanded.

Gabriel looked out the window. “What,” he said, “trees, a street, a wagon…”

“What kind of wagon?”

Gabriel peered through his spectacles. “I don’t know. A yellow wagon. Have you lost your wits?”

Maria had stepped up behind Christina and was peering over her shoulder. “Comer India Pale Ale,” she said, giving Christina a mystified look.

Christina bent over to hug her brother and sighed. “Oh, I’m so glad your eyesight hasn’t recovered!”

For a moment Gabriel’s face clouded in real anger, and then he just laughed softly and pushed her away with one hand. He took a deep breath, then said, “You thought I blooded it? That wasn’t what our uncle wanted — I was never one of Boadicea’s victims.”

And how can you be certain of that? wondered Christina; but she said, “It would nevertheless have constituted renewing your vows to him, I’m sure.”

William was standing by Christina now. “We need to search the whole house, attic and basement too, and the garden,” he said. “Gabriel might have hidden it anywhere, in his … distracted state last night. And Gabriel, you must try very hard to remember! Walk around the house with us! Christina, do you think you could sense the statue, if you were near it?”

Christina frowned and glanced at Gabriel.

He was staring out the window again. “Never mind, William,” he said softly. “Christina is right. Algy has certainly taken it and rubbed his restorative blood on it.” He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “The only thing my midnight escapade accomplished was to make our uncle stronger.”

“And to recover your poetry,” William pointed out, nodding at the moldy notebook in Gabriel’s hands.

“Yes.” Gabriel laid it down and wiped his hands on his waistcoat. “My poetry.” Christina could smell the book’s mildew.

Gabriel put his spectacles back on and stood up, and he gripped Maria’s shoulders. “He almost took Christina by force on Wednesday night,” he said. “The only thing that saved our sister was the timely intervention of Charles Cayley!”

“I know,” said Maria, staring straight back at him, “of no way we can use to trap our uncle.”

She turned and left the room.

Christina called after her, and crossed to the doorway to call again down the hall, but a moment later she stepped back into the room, shaking her head.

“Moony won’t play,” she sighed.

After a pause, “‘No way we can use,’” echoed William, “Christian scruples of some sort?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel, sitting down again. “And immovable.”

“Can we … get it,” said Christina, “from Algy? He’ll have hidden it.”

“We could torture him,” said Gabriel with a shrug, “but he’d like that.”

“Appeal to him?” suggested William. “In friendship?”

Gabriel shook his head. “Try appealing to a drunkard, in friendship. And this is vastly more compelling than drink.”

“We must none of us marry, or have children,” said Christina. “William, you and Maria have been safe up till now, you’re apparently considered members of its family somehow — possibly because you grew up with the statue, you participated in its renaming of us all as card suits — a provisional protection at best, I think. You both need to begin taking precautions. Whenever—”

“Never marry?” protested William. “Never have children? Because a ghost would be jealous? I’m forty years old, I can’t—”

“He’s more than a ghost!” interrupted Christina. “You were there at the séance on Tuesday — and I think you saw him, and he even spoke to you, in your vision! I think he spoke to each of us.”

William opened his mouth and then looked away, and in that instant Christina was sure that William had somehow met their uncle again, since the séance.

“You said he kills people we love,” William went on stubbornly, still looking away. “Whom has he killed?”

“Well — he killed that veterinary surgeon’s wife and sons…”

“He did?” William was looking at her now. “When was this? Killed them how?”

“Fifteen or twenty years ago,” admitted Christina. “They were on a boat on the river…”

“I’ll wager the coroner came to a different conclusion than ‘killed by a ghost.’”

“Oh — your children will die, William, trust me! Gabriel, do séances have to be done at night?”

“Hmm?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. They always seem to be.”

“I can think of one ghost that might know how to unmake our uncle — your son. The dead boy. And ghosts don’t seem to be able to lie.”

“Oh God. He’s not my son. No, damn it, he is my son — how did our poor father do this to us?” He got to his feet, looking much older than his forty-one years. “Not that we didn’t cooperate.” He held up one trembling hand. “Me too, ’Stina; I did it too.”

“I haven’t done it,” said William, and Christina was unhappily sure that the statement had an unspoken yet at the end of it.

“Fetch your pencils and papers,” said Christina. “If the creature can appear in your bedroom during the day, it can likely participate in a daytime séance.”

THE CAB DRIVER WHO slanted his two-wheeled hansom cab in toward the curb when Trelawny waved at him didn’t register any surprise or suspicion at being hailed by such a wild-haired and casually dressed figure in front of a Pelham Crescent house, and he didn’t ask to see the money in advance, so Trelawny assumed that the man had dealt with him before.

“A tour of the river,” he said as he climbed in. “Battersea Bridge first.”

The morning’s rain had stopped, and the arches and chimneys and business signs of the buildings along the Fulham Road flickered and dimmed with the intermittent returning sunlight.

He took out the box from under his coat and laid it on the seat beside him. “A last look ’round,” he said to it, squinting against the bracing headwind. “You always preferred the night, but — can you hear me, even all broken up? The hell of it is, I know you still love me.” He patted it with his wrinkled old hand. “We have had some times, these twelve years — haven’t we? — since I found you in that ravine, and took you in.”

This morning he had realized, with a chill, that he had not yet disposed of the box containing the petrified kernel of the Boadicea creature. And when this thought was quickly followed by a lately familiar breezy feeling that all was well and he should think of something else, he recognized the latter thought as … not his own.

Immediately he had pulled the mirror box out from under his bed, fetched a hammer from the downstairs kitchen, and on the fireplace hearth he had spilled the tiny statue out of the mirror box and quickly pounded it to tiny fragments. Then he had carefully swept up all the broken pieces, along with a good deal of the inadvertently shattered hearth bricks, and tipped them back into the mirror box.

And now he was going to sift a third of the debris into the river from Battersea Bridge, a third from Waterloo Bridge, and the last, down to the final shake of dust, from London Bridge.

The cab rattled on past Beaufort Street, which was the most direct way to the bridge; Trelawny glared up over his shoulder toward the driver, but the man had closed the communicating hatch. Then the vehicle went right past Park Walk too, and Trelawny reached out through the open side window and pounded on the outside of the cab.

“Idiot!” he yelled. “Turn south!”

The reins slithered through the bracket on the roof and the cab slowed, and at the same time a young man ran up alongside on the right and hopped up onto the step in front of the wheel, leaning in over Trelawny. He was smiling under disordered curly dark hair, and he was holding a wide-barreled old flintlock pistol aimed at Trelawny’s side.

“Silver bullets,” he said, with an accent Trelawny recognized as Italian. “Just sit tight for another minute.”

From where he sat, Trelawny couldn’t hope to knock the pistol aside, nor reach his own at all quickly.

The cab finally turned right, between the close buildings of Limerston Street, and then it was steered into the yard of the gray, narrow-windowed Chelsea Workhouse. The smell of bad meat and old oil was beginning to reassert itself over the acid scent of rain-washed pavement.

The mare had slowed to a walk, and the cab was rolling slowly toward a shadowed arch at the north end of the four-story building, where three men stood around a good-sized carriage with a couple of horses harnessed to it.

One of the men stepped out of the shadows and held up his hand — and even at a distance of a dozen yards Trelawny saw the black mark on the palm.

“You’re Carbonari,” he said to the man on the cab’s step. “Don’t interfere with me — in this box I’ve got the female vampire herself, petrified and shattered. I’m going to scatter her into the river.”

“That was good work,” said the man, smiling and cocking his head. “We’ll toss your box in a dustbin for you.”

“Dustbin? You idiot, did you understand what I said? It’s the female vampire, the British one! Let me explain it to one of your dago friends who has more English.”

“The vampires are about to be made obsolete,” the man said, speaking the term with relish.

Trelawny guessed what the man must mean by “made obsolete,” and he yawned and tensed himself for a grab at the gun barrel.

“Na-ah,” the man said, hopping backward off the step to the cobblestones and raising his pistol to aim it at Trelawny’s head. “We may not kill you if you play along, but we got no reluctance to deal with your corpse.”

“May not kill me!” said Trelawny bitterly, relaxing back into the seat. “By cutting my throat!”

“Our man is a surgeon,” called the young Carbonari, walking alongside the cab now and keeping the pistol raised. “He’ll try to do no more cutting than’s necessary to stop you being the bridge man.”

Trelawny made himself breathe deeply and evenly. He touched his throat, feeling the bulge of the stone lump behind the pulse of his jugular. The thing had definitely grown, in these dozen years since he had invited Miss B. to come home with him.

And by trapping her a week ago, and breaking up her physical form, he had evidently lost her protective attention! Until a week ago the Carbonari would never have dared to threaten him with violence.

Trelawny forced himself to relax and think.

Perhaps this was the appropriate way for it all to end at last — Edward John Trelawny, onetime friend to Byron and Shelley, murdered by Carbonari agents in the yard of a London workhouse at the age of seventy-seven. He had long since made arrangements to be buried beside Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The goal of these Carbonari was to eradicate the vampire race and save London, just as his was—could he fight them?

He laughed silently and flexed his hands. Only to the death, he thought, and he rehearsed how he would draw his revolver and spring out of the cab on the left side, away from the men by the carriage.

The rattle of the cab was louder when it rocked in under the arch, and Trelawny quickly pushed the cab’s leather flap aside and rolled out, dropping to his hands and knees as he drew his revolver and noting the men’s legs and ankles as he brought the barrel up.

But one man simply dropped, with a spatter of red blood at his throat, and the others were now shouting and running; Trelawny got to his feet, cursing the pain in his knees that slowed him and set his heart to knocking.

The driver of his cab had drawn a revolver of his own, but he was pointing it away from Trelawny, at the other side of the cab. The pistol went off with a flare and a resounding crack, and then the man jumped down from the cab, landing awkwardly but limping away without a pause.

Two more pistol shots hammered the air under the arch, and somewhere on the other side of the horse a man screamed.

The mare was frantically shying away, backing the cab and grinding her flank against the brick wall, and Trelawny forced his sharply protesting knees to step back to avoid being knocked down and trampled. Through the slack reins he glimpsed men in some thrashing struggle, but his focus now was simply on the wedge of clear pavement between the wall and the jigging cab, and he grabbed the cab lamp with his free hand and pulled himself farther toward the rear of the cab, away from the stamping mare. He was panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes.

Then a squat figure had blocked the gray daylight in front of him, between the rear of the cab and the wall. Trelawny raised his shaking pistol and forced himself to focus on the lumpy silhouette, and he saw that it had no head, just a broad flat hat that rested right on its shoulders.

Trelawny recognized it — he had seen it in Rossetti’s bedroom only a few hours ago — but in that instant the thing once again dissolved into oily smoke, and when the gun jumped and cracked in Trelawny’s hand, it was too late. The pistol ball whacked into brick somewhere across the street.

Trelawny wasn’t able to take a deep breath, and his vision was darkening; and he didn’t resist when an arm caught him around the ribs and braced him up. He barely had the strength to lift the revolver and tuck it into his belt, and he let his unseen companion boost him up into the cab.

The long reins slid through the bracket on the roof and then were caught and drawn inside hand over hand, and the cab was rocking as the mare eagerly backed out of the shadowed arch into the bright yard.

After a few seconds of the cab rolling backward, the reins snapped and the mare snorted and stamped but began trotting obediently forward. Trelawny was rocked against the cab’s right panel.

He rolled his throbbing head to look at the stranger who was now driving the cab from inside.

The teeth were bared in a permanent rictus grin in the skeletal gray face, and its wide eyes swiveled toward him and then back to the horse. The spidery gray hands on the reins were splashed with fresh blood.

The thing spoke then, and its voice was a flat squeak: “A spirit present? In a sense!” And it reached up with its left hand and knocked once against the cab’s low ceiling. A few moments later it sighed, with a sound like sand spilling from a shovel.

It rolled its eyes toward Trelawny, and its involuntary grin widened. “Marry!” it said then in a voice like wood creaking. “Well, not the ceremony, but one part of ‘marry,’ yes!”

It reached up and knocked again.

GABRIEL HAD PULLED THE curtains across the brightening view of the river, and William had fetched the table while Christina assembled papers and pencils, and the first question they had asked when the three of them had sat down was, Is there a spirit present?

The table had shaken with a single knock — yes.

The next question had been, Are you Gabriel’s son, who wants to marry the horse-doctor’s daughter?

After a pause, there had again been a single knock.

“Our uncle,” said Christina now, speaking into the air below the high ceiling, “was locked up for seven years. Do you know how we might banish him forever?”

THE GRAY BOY HAD guided the cab into an alley across Limerston Street, and then its nimble fingers had untied the strings on a canvas rain-flap that tumbled down to block the view of shadowed windows and doors ahead. The only light in the cab’s narrow interior now was the dim reflection from the close brick walls visible through the windows on either side.

Trelawny made himself face his grotesque companion without flinching, though he allowed himself to press against the right panel. The creature had tucked a ragged parasol between its knees, and Trelawny noticed for the first time that it was wearing a big blanket wrapped around its shoulders like a toga, and a couple of little round holes in it seemed to be bullet holes, though there was no blood around them. The thing’s breath, he noticed, was colder than the outside air and smelled of river mud.

The dead boy had picked up the mirror box in its left hand and was clutching it to itself, away from Trelawny.

“I do know a way,” it said, and raised its right hand to the roof and rapped on it once.

THE TABLE SHOOK AT a single knock under Christina’s fingertips.

“How?” she whispered.

The clock on the mantel ticked off a dozen seconds, and William cleared his throat.

“Remember it can’t spell.”

“Does it,” asked Christina, “involve cutting Edward Trelawny’s throat?”

“THEY KNOW ABOUT YOU,” quacked the gray thing as it rapped the cab’s roof once. It wiggled its bloody fingers. “Just as these dead men did.”

“Those … dead men wanted to kill me.”

“Fools,” said the thing.

“They didn’t want the box,” Trelawny added, nodding toward the box in the thing’s left hand.

“Fools,” it said again.

Trelawny’s heart was knocking hollowly in his chest, and he had to take a breath to speak again.

“You … rescued me from them?”

“I rescued her,” the thing said, shaking the mirror box.

Trelawny’s head ached. “Stop hitting the roof, will you?”

The dead boy shrugged his knobby shoulders under the blanket. “I can do it just as well with my teeth.”

The thing wasn’t looking at him, so Trelawny let his hand slip toward the flap of his coat that concealed the revolver.

“THAT’S A YES,” SAID Gabriel. “I should have cut the old bastard’s throat in Regent’s Park.”

“I wonder if that’s what Maria won’t tell us,” said William. “She can’t condone murder.”

“Neither can we,” said Christina.

“What do you call killing our uncle?” asked William.

“He’s not human,” said Christina desperately, “and he’s died already, by his own hand.”

“You,” said Gabriel, speaking toward the ceiling, “had two human parents—”

THE DEAD BOY BESIDE Trelawny clicked its teeth together — three distinct times.

“I had at least three human parents,” the thing said to Trelawny. “The first time, though, I was lost in a miscarriage.”

“You look it,” said Trelawny.

Then he snatched out the revolver, rammed it against the blanket over the dead boy’s ribs, and pulled the trigger.

Even with the muzzle against the cloth, the detonation battered Trelawny’s eardrums in the curtained cab interior.

“NO?” SAID GABRIEL AFTER the latest three knocks, and the dawning relief was evident in his high-pitched voice. “Am I your father or not?”

The pause that followed this was so long that Gabriel had opened his mouth to speak again, when the table knocked once in reply. Yes.

“But Lizzie was your mother…?”

Again there was the Yes reply.

“That’s two! Both all too human!”

Christina was dizzy, and a high-pitched wail seemed to be keening in her head. “Was there ever,” she said, speaking too loudly; she exhaled and went on, “a third parent?” Earlier? she thought.

The table banged once.

“Were you,” she asked, “reincarnated, after that, as Lizzie and Gabriel’s child?” She sat back and whispered, “Insistent to be born?”

She had half expected it, but the single rap made her jump.

TRELAWNY WAS COUGHING IN the haze of black-powder smoke as the dead boy’s right hand reached across him and gripped the pistol, and its lengthening, twining fingers held the hammer down and prevented a second shot.

Blinking and gasping in the dimness, Trelawny could see that a fresh, smoking hole had been punched into the blanket over the boy’s torso, but there was no drop of any blood, and the dead boy seemed unconcerned — the big white teeth had clicked again, four distinctly separated times, in the moments since Trelawny had fired the gun.

Trelawny tugged against the snaky fingers that enveloped his right hand, but the dead boy was strong.

“No, you don’t leave here,” the thing said, and Trelawny could hear air escaping from a hole in its ribs as it spoke, “until he congeals again and comes here, and takes you — your soul, with his teeth — from the other side of your neck, away from the stone.”

I HAVE TO KNOW, thought Christina, though her forehead was already cold with perspiration. She looked at the dimly visible faces of her brothers, then looked away, toward the curtained windows. “Are you,” she asked hoarsely, “the child I miscarried when I was fifteen?”

TRELAWNY WAS STARTLED WHEN, after a pause, the dead boy again clicked his teeth once. “That’s it, my never-mother,” it said. “I needed to be born, so my dead soul crawled among the sea worms on the dark river bottom until the other patron found me, and she found another womb for me.”

His eel-like fingers tightened on Trelawny’s right hand.

AFTER THE LAST KNOCK, Gabriel and William leaped up, for Christina had fainted and fallen out of her chair onto the carpet.

TRELAWNY SPREAD HIS CONFINED fingers to release the revolver, and the boy’s fingers stretched out — each a full foot long now — and took the gun away from him.

“What,” said Trelawny, “if I don’t care to be bitten? She,” he added, nodding toward the box the dead boy held, “never bit me.”

“And look at her now! Your gratitude has near killed her. She was slow — you should have died and come back long ago. He will be here soon.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to reason with him,” said Trelawny with every appearance of relaxed confidence. Inwardly, though, he was bracing himself for a desperate move. Slowly enough not to seem threatening, he reached into his coat and drew out his pewter flask.

“I daresay you don’t drink,” he remarked to his cadaverous companion as he unscrewed the cap.

“What I drink is not in that container,” the thing said.

It turned its bald granite-colored gourd of a head to the left as it tucked the revolver away beside the box on its side of the seat, and Trelawny gritted his teeth and reached into his side pocket for a box of matches.

In one motion he pulled out the box, slid it open, flipped out a match and struck it, and as it flared he whirled the flask in a circle, splashing warm brandy in every direction; he dropped the lit match and the flask as the cab’s interior flared in a bright inferno.

The dead boy burst out in a loud wailing, thrashing on the seat and beating at the flaming blanket it wore, and Trelawny sprang forward; he swept the leather flap aside and put one boot on the low front partition and grabbed the reins, and then vaulted out onto the mare’s back.

She lurched in surprise at the sudden weight, and then neighed shrilly and tugged forward, her flanks apparently stung by his flaming trousers. He fumbled his pocketknife free and leaned down to saw through the leather trace and the tug strap that held the shaft on the right side — the mare had helpfully drawn them out taut — and then switched hands and bent to do the same on the left side, and then the mare and her smoking rider were galloping down the alley, Trelawny desperately gripping the long, trailing reins right above their rings in the little harness saddle.

His hat and coat and beard flickered with hot blue flames, and as soon as the mare had rounded the next corner, he managed to rein her in and then slid off her back, and as she raced away in the direction of the King’s Road, he found a broad puddle of icy mud to roll in.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE AFTERGLOW OF sunset still shone pink on the steeple of St. Clement Dane’s in the Strand, but Wych Street was in evening shadow. Lights shone in the windows of the pub on the corner, and Crawford had lit his porch lamp an hour ago.

Standing in the street, he reached up now to slide the latest box — scalpels, forceps, ropes, and muzzles — onto the back of the wagon stopped in front of his door, and then he leaned on the rear wheel to catch his breath.

This lot, which included a few good pieces of furniture, was going into storage, to be sent for when he had found a location for a veterinary surgery in France. His personal luggage was in a trunk in the parlor — Johanna didn’t have anything to pack but a few clothes Crawford and Christina Rossetti had bought for her, and McKee had even less, and both of them kept their knives on their persons.

Johanna faced tomorrow’s departure from England eagerly; her impression of France was derived from a translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales that she’d bought while she’d been a coster girl — and she had been wearing the filthy translator shoes for six hours now, and would have to sleep in them tonight, and she was volubly looking forward to taking them off on the dock at Dieppe and pitching them into the sea.

Crawford was a bit disconcerted at his own readiness to abandon the country of his birth; but his first wife and family were lost to him, and he now realized that the city of London had for these last sixteen years been a constant, enervating reminder of them. And he thanked God that he had happened to wander out onto Waterloo Bridge, on that February evening in 1862, and jumped into the river with McKee.

McKee, though, had been moody and quiet as she had made ham and chutney sandwiches and then helped carry boxes down the stairs. Crawford supposed that she was remembering whatever attractions her renounced common-law husband had presumably once had.

Crawford fetched a cigar out of his pocket and cupped his hands against the autumn breeze to strike a match to it. He stepped away from the wagon and leaned against the area railing.

Tomorrow night they would be in France, at first among British tourists in Dieppe and then, as soon as it was feasible, somewhere farther from the sea — ideally in some place where a British veterinary surgeon with a limited command of the French language might hope to establish a practice.

Fast footsteps crunching on the street made him look up, and at first his chest went cold to see the silhouette of a boy running toward him; then the boy was closer to the porch lamp, and Crawford saw that it was not the cadaverous figure he had briefly seen in Gabriel Rossetti’s bedroom this morning.

“Message for Johanna,” the boy gasped. He wore a velvet skullcap, and his hair was long in front and twisted into curls, and he appeared to be about Johanna’s age.

“I’m her father,” said Crawford. “I can deliver it.”

The boy shook his head. “She paid me to hear it herself.”

Crawford was about to insist when Johanna came tapping down the stairs.

“Hullo, Ollie,” she said. “Is he dead drunk somewhere, I hope?”

“Dead somewhere, is the fact,” said Ollie. “Hanged hisself three nights ago, buried on Wednesday. Driven to the deed by grief, they say, being as his woman left him.”

“Thanks, Ollie,” Johanna said, and Ollie touched his cap and ran away back the way he’d come.

Johanna leaned on the railing beside Crawford. After a moment, she said, “I stole a shilling from you.”

“You’re welcome to my shillings,” he said. His first reaction had been relief, but now he was wondering how McKee would react to the news.

“That was Ollie.”

Crawford nodded and puffed on his cigar.

“I know him a bit from my coster time.” She sighed. “I paid him the shilling to find out where that Tom fellow was—‘spoon seller, common-law husband of Hail Mary McKee who does business mainly in Hare Street.’” She looked up at Crawford. “I wouldn’t tell her till we’re across the Channel.”

He shook his head firmly. “No, I’ve got to tell her.”

“She won’t … change her mind about going, then, out of remorse, or something? Or get all weepy?”

Crawford sighed, blowing out a plume of smoke. “I suppose she might get weepy. Don’t you, sometimes?”

“No. Not for years.”

Crawford glanced up at the darkening sky. “We should be inside, even with your magical shoes.”

“Filthy things,” she said, pushing away from the railing and hurrying up the steps into the house.

Crawford followed more slowly, and he paused at the top of the steps to have a few more puffs of the cigar.

Perhaps he didn’t have to tell her. How reliable was Ollie? An unfounded rumor…

Still, Crawford would have to tell her what Ollie had said. He sighed, pitched the cigar butt into the street, and went inside.

The parlor to his left was an empty room now, with pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had hung, and most of the floor was bright clean wood, protected for years by the now-removed carpet. He could hear clatter in the dining room and pushed open the door.

Johanna had resumed wrapping glass jars in flannel scraps and packing them into a crate in the middle of the floor where the table had stood, and Crawford wondered if they would be unpacked again in his lifetime, or ever.

“Your mother?” he asked.

“Upstairs, I believe,” said Johanna.

It was as if — in fact it was nearly literally the case that — his whole life was being disassembled from around and under him, and he had to let go of it and jump, as he had let go of the bottom-most rung in that well under Highgate Cemetery, with McKee and Johanna waiting below.

And they were with him now, and they were all he still had.

The whisky decanter sat on the floor near where Johanna was working, and he bent to pick it up and move it away from her, but he paused to take a mouthful from the neck of it.

He heard McKee’s voice in the hallway now, and a man’s voice.

Clearly he heard her say, “Oh, very well, come in then.”

He exchanged one horrified glance with his daughter, and then he had dropped the decanter and both of them burst through the dining-room door into the parlor.

McKee was just stepping into the room, and right behind her, still in the hall shadows, came a tall, burly figure.

Not caring if he was wrong, hoping he was, Crawford took two running steps and launched himself at McKee — he had one second in which to see her startled face, with another face looming behind her with its mouth opening — and then Crawford had grabbed McKee around the waist and flung her back toward Johanna.

Crawford’s momentum sent him plunging into the man behind McKee, and the man’s arm whipped around Crawford’s shoulders and yanked him into a tighter embrace — the man’s coat was damp and smelled of clay — and then sharp teeth punctured Crawford’s throat.

HIS VIEW OF HIS own house was odd — he could see the exterior and the hallway and the parlor all at once, and the figure of McKee was a wavy ribbon bending from the door around the interior corner and into the parlor. He could see himself too, a blurred streak from the dining room, and Johanna, whose streak extended to where the McKee ribbon met it.

The ribbon people — he knew the trails of their motions were threaded all through the City, if he cared to trace them backward — had detectable personalities, and he was one of them himself, but Crawford could feel an immensely bigger, older, fuller identity overshadowing him. It communicated simply by existing, and it promised him relief from the crushing disparity of their stations, and immortality, soon.

THEN SOUNDS CRASHED BACK on him as he hit the bare wooden floor with his knee and elbow, and the smell of garlic burned in his nose, and bright red drops of his blood were pattering onto the boards.

One of Johanna’s awful old shoes was directly in front of his face, grinding backward as she straddled him and lunged. He rolled over onto his back and saw that she had plunged her knife to the hilt into Tom’s throat. Yellow fragments of garlic were spattered across Tom’s shirt and unshaven face, and in Johanna’s left hand was an empty jar.

Tom’s eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only whites, and he convulsively jerked backward, off the knife, and he turned and clumped into the hall and away down the front steps. He seemed shorter than he had a moment ago when he had loomed over McKee’s shoulder.

Johanna ran after him and slammed the door, and as Crawford struggled up to a sitting position, he heard her shoot the bolt. He clasped a trembling hand to his throat and then lifted it away, and the palm was bright and shiny with fresh red blood — but the blood wasn’t spurting. No vein or artery had been punctured.

McKee was crouched in front of him, her face white as sea foam. A moment later Johanna was beside her, her eyes wide.

“He — killed himself,” Crawford gasped, “died, at least—” He waved at Johanna, who tersely told McKee what Ollie had said minutes earlier.

McKee wailed softly and pounded a fist on the floor. “And you took it, to save me!”

Crawford knew what he had to say, but for several seconds he simply couldn’t do it.

“Go,” he choked at last, “now. Take the wagon, sell what’s on it, but—” To his agonized impatience, Johanna ran out of the room, but she was back in a moment with a towel, which she wrapped tightly around his neck.

“Don’t go to Newhaven,” he went on hoarsely, “or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country.” His vision blurred, for tears were spilling down his cheeks. “If you ever see me again — God forbid — run. And have garlic and silver bullets ready.”

“I invited him in!” said McKee. “Why in the name of — my damnation did I invite him in?”

“I should have told you immediately,” Crawford said. “Go, both of you — Polidori can see through me, I’m sure of it. Adelaide, I love you. Johanna, I love you.”

Johanna was sobbing, and she threw her arms around his neck, rubbing the towel painfully against his cut, but he caught her up in a fierce hug. “Don’t get weepy,” he whispered.

“You are,” she choked.

He kissed her and pushed her back, and then McKee was hugging him, not sobbing but grinding her teeth and knotting her fingers in his hair.

“You’re the best man I ever knew,” she whispered, “or could ever hope to know.”

“Likewise,” was all he could think to say to her. “Go. Save our daughter. Don’t look back.”

“I — can’t,” said Johanna, shaking her head. “It’s — too much, after everything.”

“I love you both,” Crawford said desperately. “Save the people I love, please.”

McKee nodded and stood up and jerked Johanna to her feet. “We can do this for him,” she told her daughter, and the two sets of footsteps, one dragging, receded down the hall as Crawford resolutely looked away.

After a few minutes he heard horses being harnessed to the wagon — and faintly heard McKee say “No” sharply — and then the wagon creaked and rumbled away toward the Strand.

His shoulders shook with nearly silent weeping as he struggled to stand up, and he looked with despair at the gleaming shards of the broken whisky decanter.

For what might have been several minutes he just leaned against the wall, breathing and pressing the towel to the throbbing wound in his neck.

Then motion to his left caught his eye, and he was not altogether surprised to see a chair in the previously empty street-side corner, nor to see that a man sat in it, holding out a glass.

“Drink up,” the man said.

He was older now, appearing to be perhaps thirty, with a golden beard and broad shoulders, but Crawford recognized him.

“Girard,” he said softly. Another chair stood now near the first, and Crawford wearily shambled over to it and sat down, accepting the glass of whisky with his free hand.

Crawford took a sip and then said, “Is it endurable?”

His son pursed his lips and rocked his head back and forth. “More endurable than being a plain ghost in the river, I think,” he said, “though that does have the advantage of not lasting long. And I’m not much of myself anymore, in any case.” He smiled, and Crawford remembered the smile. “You won’t be either.”

Crawford took a sip of the whisky and relaxed — and he wondered if he had truly relaxed in years, or ever. The wound in his throat didn’t pain him now, and he let the towel fall away.

“I’m sorry I ran away from you, by the river,” he said. “All those years ago.”

Girard nodded judicially. “It would have been better for everyone if you had not,” he agreed. “But you’re at peace now.”

“Is there … you’re my son, still, in some ways … is there any way out?”

“Immediate high amputation has been known to prevent possession,” said Girard, “but it’s far too late for that, the seeds are all through your bloodstream by now — and in your case it would have involved cutting off your head.” He laughed softly.

Crawford stared at him. “Your mother, and Richard — they’re gone?”

“Down dead in the river beyond our reach, and certainly dissolved out in the sea long ago.”

“Do you — can you — miss them?”

“No. You don’t miss them either, do you?”

Crawford realized that in fact he did not. “If I hadn’t run away from you,” he said, looking curiously at the glass in his hand, “I’d never have met Adelaide. Johanna would not exist.”

“Our patron would have got another girl. He will now, if he can’t find this — this Johanna.” Girard’s nostrils flared as he pronounced the name.

“You hate her,” Crawford noted. The glass in his hand was more transparent than it should have been, and it occurred to him that the taste of the whisky was more a memory of whisky than an immediate sensation.

The glass had no weight either. He opened his hand, and the glass dissolved in place, like a puff of smoke.

“You’ll soon find better drink than whisky,” said the figure in the other chair. It still had the appearance of a young man, but the likeness to Crawford’s son had faded in a nondescript blandness. “When a son of mine, an extension of me, squanders his love on a mayfly, I hate the mayfly, and I would kill it. But she may yet become an extension of me.” The figure smiled again, but it was no longer the smile Crawford remembered. “You can help us find her. She would be vulnerable to you — her emotions are stronger than her reason.”

Crawford nodded. That was probably true.

He was aware of a springy lightness in his chest, a restlessness that had begun faintly to disperse the relaxation he’d been feeling moments ago. He wanted to be outdoors, in the streets, in the dark.

“Night is your time now,” said the thing that was now simply Polidori, with the remembered dark hair and mustache and deep-set eyes. “You’ll come to hate daylight. Your place by day will be among the tombs, and the regions under the tombs, but by night you will be a citizen of every place under the moon.”

Crawford stood up, and when he looked around his chair was gone; and when he looked back, there was no chair or person in the corner.

He found that he was walking to the hall, and then that he was opening the door and descending to the street.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FULL MOON was visible to Crawford’s left, just clearing the sawtooth rooftops and transfixed by the black spire of St. Clement’s, but he walked the other way, into the shadows to Newcastle Street, and then he dodged cabs and carriages across the lamplit Strand to skirt the austere pillars and arches of Somerset House and turn left at Wellington Street, which led out onto Waterloo Bridge.

Polidori’s attention was as constant as a faint smell or a distant noise, but Crawford was already able to ignore it most of the time.

It wasn’t raining tonight, but when he had paid his ha’penny at the turnstile and walked out as far as the recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge’s arches over the river, he stopped with such deliberateness that he roused himself from the acquiescent daze that had been almost pleasantly dispersing all connected thoughts.

It seemed to him that it had been raining, here, on some night long ago. Why had he come here tonight?

In his momentary alertness, he noted that he had come out without a coat, and his shirtsleeves were rippling in what must have been a chilling wind — but he felt nothing, warm or cold.

There were no lamps on the bridge, and by the slanting moonlight he could clearly see the dome of St. Paul’s a mile away to the east.

He shivered as the nearly lost memory came back to him. It had been raining when he had walked out here fourteen years ago and seen Adelaide McKee for the first time — and a thing that must have been the Polidori demon had come rushing at them out of the sky, and Crawford had thrown McKee into the river and jumped in after her.

That had been the night on which Johanna was conceived.

He remembered now that Johanna and McKee were gone—Don’t go to Newhaven, he had told them not an hour ago, or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country. If you ever see me again — God forbid — run.

And Polidori had said, She would be vulnerable to you — her emotions are stronger than her reason.

Fourteen years ago he had wondered why he had walked out onto the bridge, and he had speculated that his unexamined purpose might have been to jump off the bridge — to commit suicide.

In fact, he had wound up jumping off the bridge that night, though it had not been to kill himself.

But now he remembered what McKee had said to Gabriel Rossetti, in Regent’s Park seven years ago, about Johanna: If she does die… I want to see that she stays dead.

The vampires’ awareness, their power, didn’t seem to work under the surface of the river. McKee had noted with approval that Crawford’s instinctive reaction on the bridge that night had been to get them both into the river. At the time he had remembered his parents advising that course of action, though he couldn’t remember anything about them now.

He walked past the remembered stone seat, slowly to the middle of the bridge. There was an inset seat here too, and he stepped up onto it.

The moon behind him was well clear of the skyline now, and the towers and chimneys of London were spread out in a vast receding mosaic of black and white on either hand, with the dark river moving wide between them.

Polidori’s attention became more palpably intrusive, and it was increasing by the moment.

Crawford set one booted foot firmly on the broad rail, and then with the other he stepped right out beyond it, into empty air.

Without the sensation of air rushing past him, he seemed for a couple of long seconds to be floating in the sky.

Then he struck the surface feet first and plunged deep, and he could feel temperature again — the water was so shockingly cold that he expelled his breath in a muffled yell that blew a gout of bubbles past his face; and he had to summon up a flickering memory of Johanna and McKee to let himself keep on emptying his lungs, deliberately now, and holding his arms down at his sides.

They live if I do this, his mind shouted at his rigidly restrained reflexes. They live if I do this!

The silvery ripples of moonlight on the surface were quickly lost in darkness, and his ears seemed to be imploding with the pressure — the withering chill of the black water grew worse as he continued to sink, and irretrievable bubbles of air escaped from his lungs as hitching sobs — and finally his boots actually sank into mud, up to the ankles.

Knowing that he would soon begin involuntarily to struggle back up toward the distant surface in spite of his quaking determination, he forced the last tiny volumes of air out of his throat and mouth, and let himself sink toward a sitting position. He was shivering and clenching his teeth in a mouthful of salty river water.

In his head were ringing Trelawny’s remembered words: 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…

And Crawford felt something like a cold worm in his mind convulse and withdraw. He was all alone now in the dark and cold at the very bottom of the world.

By the time his spine overcame his brain and set his hands to flailing in the lightless water, his lungs were aching and heaving against his closed throat, and he had struggled only a few yards up from the bottom when his tugging lungs forced him to inhale, and then he was choking, his nose and throat full of water and his chest spasming uselessly.

THERE WAS NO LIGHT, but he could sense his own limp body drifting below him; and it seemed to him that the river floor was like the upthrust hands of a dense crowd, as a multitude of unseen fishes and worms hungrily groped and corkscrewed up toward him, toward his disembodied identity — but his identity was diminished and no longer able to feel any anxiety. The river was the world, flickering and agitated at its finite surface but eternally unchanging in the endless volume below.

Crawford directed his dimming consciousness downward, toward the approaching fins and tentacles.

But a shiver of something like a remembered melody or scent buoyed his awareness — and he sensed the approach of old companions who didn’t quite forget, and a graciousness that was not wholly erased by death.

His eyes registered a dim phosphorescence, and his hands reached out — he was back in his body! — and he felt rippling fur against his palms.

Tails and arching backs moved in his vision, and paddling paws; and then in front of him hung the face of a cat — only one eye stared into his eyes, for where the cat’s other eye should have been was an empty socket.

And he dazedly recognized the tufted cheeks and one crumpled ear — this was Raymond, one of his distressed cats who had died in his arms years ago.

Crawford was gratefully ready to expire in the ghost company of Raymond and all the other cats he had loved…

But Raymond poked his muzzle into Crawford’s mouth, as he had often done when he was a kitten, and Crawford had to struggle not to push the animal away, for it felt as if the cat were sucking the remaining wisps of life out of him. But Crawford knew he was surely dying in any case, and he surrendered to his old friend.

Shifting forms gathered under Crawford’s body, pushing him upward — when he groped below him, he felt tails, and velvet paws, and muscles under fur.

Now Raymond was exhaling, blowing lion’s breath into Crawford’s lungs, and inhaling, and exhaling again. The cat’s breath drummed with a well-remembered purring, and Crawford could sense two paws against his chest alternately clenching and relaxing. And the backs of what must have been dozens of cats were pressing him upward through the shifting cold water.

When Crawford could see the moonlit ripples on the river surface above him, Raymond drew back and stared into his eyes for a long moment, and the one eye shone with unforgotten companionship and play, and then he and all the ghost cats swirled away below.

Crawford found that he was holding his breath, and he kicked and spread his arms out and down. Luckily he seemed to have lost one of his boots in the mud of the river bottom, for the remaining one was a heavy anchor on his foot; but he gave a last powerful kick and then his face was above the water, in the cold air, and he was treading water and coughing violently.

Within a minute he was able to inhale more air than he coughed out, and he held his breath and ducked his head under the surface, and unbuckled his remaining boot and let it sink away.

Raising his head, he found that his breath was still hitching and uneven — and he realized that he was weeping for the loss of gallant Raymond and all the other beloved small identities who had remembered him even after death, and saved him. Ancient Egyptians had believed that a cat’s lives numbered nine — a trinity of trinities — and perhaps each of the cats who had loved him had saved one of theirs for him, saved its last breath.

He spread one hand flat on the surging dark water in a frail gesture of thanks and good-bye.

Finally, after one last racking series of coughs that dizzied him, he took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it and looked around him.

He couldn’t see either shore, but he could see the descending north arches of the moonlit bridge. He forced himself to begin swimming as strongly as he could toward the north shore.

The mind-flattening attention of Polidori was gone, and he was desperate to find McKee and Johanna.

He could feel the weight of a handful of silver coins in his trouser pocket, but he didn’t dig them out and let them sink — he would probably need it all to convince a cab driver to take a soaking wet passenger anywhere.

And there was only one destination he could think of.

CHRISTINA HAD BEEN HELPED to Gabriel’s bedroom, and after changing out of her muddy clothes into one of Gabriel’s voluminous nightshirts and downing a glass of brandy, she had fallen into a fitful sleep, and Gabriel and William had gone off to the studio.

When she awoke with a start an hour later, she hadn’t known where she was — moonlight slanted in through the one tiny uncurtained window, and she had just been able to make out the crucifix on the far wall.

Did I fall asleep, she had wondered at first, in my room at the Magdalen Penitentiary? Not in such a grand bed…

Then with a sinking heart she had remembered where she was — and what she had learned at the séance — and she got out of bed and, barefoot, hurried downstairs to the dark kitchen. The stairs were carpeted, and the flagstones of the kitchen were warmed by the stove; and though the wind boomed outside the window overlooking the back garden, she was not at all chilly in the nightshirt over her chemise.

Without striking a match to the gas jet, she dipped a teacup full of water from a basin by the sink, and she found a saltcellar and salted the water heavily; and then she pulled down one of Gabriel’s many hanging braids of garlic and crushed a dozen cloves of it with the flat of a knife and scraped up the pulp with a silver serving spoon.

She sat down at the cook’s table in the darkness and gripped the spoon and the cup. She took a deep breath; the crushed garlic overpowered the usual smells of grease and coffee.

Finally she whispered, “Are you here?”

She waited several seconds — and then the table shook once under her elbows. One knock: yes.

“Is this — am I speaking to — the child I miscarried?”

Again the table jumped once.

Her voice was thick: “Come to me, child.”

Abruptly the walls and ceiling and even the chair she was sitting on disappeared, and she sat down heavily in loose sand. A cold night wind instantly blew all the warm kitchen air out of the folds of her clothing.

She huddled in the sand, shivering and nearly whimpering but somehow still clutching the spoon and the cup; and after a few snatched breaths of the rushing air, she got her legs under herself and stood up, gripping the sand with her bare toes as she staggered in the leaching wind. Moonlit dunes stretched away under a sky more full of stars than any she’d ever seen, and there was not any compensating spark of light in the landscape.

“Mother,” came a creaking voice from behind her.

She turned and then flinched at the sight of a towering black colossus starkly silhouetted by the star fields it eclipsed. It must have stood a good hundred yards away, but it dominated the view like a medieval cathedral. With its remote high shoulders and lowered head it might have been a primordial idol of a great bird, or a wolf, or a dragon; and Christina took a step backward in the sand, viscerally sure for a moment that the mountainous thing was tipping toward her.

But it stood motionless; and closer, much closer, only a dozen yards from her across the sand, was a figure she recognized.

The skeletal dead boy was naked now, and in the moonlight she could see several rents and holes in its taut hide.

“You,” it said, “you and my bride, disappeared today, in the City. You came back into view, but she did not. Has not yet.”

“William!” Christina screamed. “Gabriel! I’m in the kitchen, help me!”

But as soon as her words were flung away by the freezing wind across the limitless desert, she knew that she was somewhere fundamentally removed from Gabriel’s kitchen, or Chelsea, or even the terrestrial world.

“Jesus help me,” she moaned, hunching her shoulders against the cold.

“He knows nothing of this place,” said the dead boy.

Christina bared her teeth as her hair flew wildly around her face. “Then let’s bring Him here,” she cried. The wind was at her back, and she flung the cupful of salted water straight at the boy’s face.

The bony gray figure twisted away, making a sound like a bedsheet ripped in two.

“I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” she shouted after it. “God help you, child!”

Then she looked up — and her knees gave way and she sat down and began frantically pushing herself backward through the mounding sand, for, with a cavernous rumble that rolled away across the sterile land, the colossus moved, and she knew who it was.

A black head like a castle lifted against the moon, and storm cloud wings churned the wind as they unfolded and hid the horizon.

Christina had intended to throw the spoonful of garlic at Polidori, but it was ludicrously inadequate against this, the antediluvian thing that had for a mere billion human heartbeats worn her uncle’s animate ghost.

She scooped up the crushed garlic and rubbed it over her face and throat, then sucked the spoon clean.

The night recoiled from her.

Into her head sprang a projected image of the water colliding with the face of the dead boy, and the boy shaking it off with impunity and staring back at her.

But that desperately advanced image blinked away. In actual fact, the skeletal gray figure was now convulsing in the sand; at one point its skull-like face was turned up toward the moon, and Christina saw black stains mottling the cheeks and covering the eyes.

She shivered and almost lost consciousness then as a wave of wordless rage scorched across the field of her thoughts and perceptions.

A black ripple like a blowing curtain to her left caught the fragments of her attention, and when she had somewhat mustered her thoughts again, she was able to recognize a sort of caricature of her uncle, its arms waving helplessly in the turbulent wind.

“Tell speak at the boy it no effect!” squawked the fluttering, nearly faceless figure. “Say him water only!”

“It is just water,” screamed Christina. “It’s baptism! I’ve saved his soul!”

The sketchy Polidori caricature wailed, “No soul!” and blew into scattering shreds—

And Christina slammed her hands against the kitchen table and slapped her feet against the tinglingly warm flagstones.

She was panting in the humid air of Gabriel’s kitchen, clutching the edges of the table now as if to force it to stay, and her eyes darted around to gratefully take in the stove and the window and the hallway arch. The spoon and the cup were nowhere to be seen.

For nearly a minute she simply concentrated on breathing in and out, though the smell and taste of garlic was overpowering.

But that’s right of course, she thought at last — a dead child has no soul in it to save. Still, the baptism clearly had some effect on his ghost. And it was all I could do.

She could still feel Polidori’s rage in her head, muted down to the usual pressure of his attention, and it carried now a flavor of wrathful promise — dead children, disease, despair.

MCKEE HAD ROUSED FATHER Cyprian from his room by pounding on the rectory door, and eventually he had opened an upstairs window; and after she and Johanna had conveyed something of the urgency of their situation, he had come downstairs with a candle and unlocked the church and led them inside. There was only one window, high on the wall above the altar, and the moonlight through the stained glass shone with various brightnesses of gray. The pews below were in darkness except for the priest’s bobbing candle and the candle in a red glass chimney burning beside the altar. The two banks of tiny votive candles that had been lit during the day had long since burned out.

McKee and Johanna sat down in the front pew, and the priest stood between it and the communion rail.

“Annulled?” he said finally. “Why? I don’t think you’ve been married twelve hours yet.”

“Because,” said McKee in a tightly controlled voice, “my husband has — unmerciful God! — had the misfortune to fall prey — to the devils we mentioned yesterday.” She inhaled and went on speaking. “My daughter — our daughter, and I, have to hide from him now, and I’m afraid the sacramental bond of marriage might be a thread he and his new master could follow.”

Wind sighed against the stained-glass window, and the doors through which they’d entered, facing Bozier’s Court, rattled on their hinges, making both McKee and Johanna jump.

The priest glanced toward the rear of the church and then looked again at McKee.

“The marriage has not been consummated?” he asked, and McKee turned her face away from the candle’s dim amber glow.

“No,” she said. “We’ve — been busy.”

“An annulment would take time.”

“We don’t have time,” said McKee, her voice cracking. “We’ve wasted more than an hour selling things in the New Cut Market, and we need to be on a boat bound somewhere tomorrow morning.”

“I’m sorry, Adelaide — I could destroy the record and you could destroy the certificate, but—”

“That would only erase it in legal terms,” said McKee, nodding hopelessly.

“An annulment,” said Father Cyprian, “even a simple and uncontested one on the basis of non-consummation, would still have to come through the bishop.” He spread his hands. “But it may be that the — the spiritual bond between you and him has not yet been forged.”

“It’s forged,” said Johanna. “I’m the forgery.” She sniffed. “The marriage was consummated — in advance, thirteen or fourteen years ago.”

“That may be true,” McKee whispered; and in the same moment, from the darkness at the back of the church, came Crawford’s voice: “That’s true.”

McKee uttered a short scream and whirled around in the pew, her hand darting under her coat; Johanna scrambled to stand on the pew, facing backward; and the priest raised his voice:

“You have no power here.”

“I have no p-power anywhere,” said Crawford hoarsely, shambling forward. “Adelaide, Johanna — I’ve escaped him, the way Trelawny did in America, by drowning myself. Throw—” He was interrupted by a fit of harsh coughing, and his hands slapped one of the middle pew backs. “Throw garlic at me. Or roll your j-jar down here and I’ll eat it.” He gave a shaky laugh. “Wait till dawn and I’ll — dance naked in direct sunlight.”

Johanna took the candle from the priest and began walking down the aisle toward Crawford.

McKee shouted, “Johanna, don’t!” She drew her knife and ran after her, but Johanna began running too, and the candle went out; and when McKee caught up with her daughter, the girl was already in Crawford’s arms.

“Don’t stab him!” yelled Johanna. “He’s right! I’d know!”

“Get away from him,” said McKee through clenched teeth.

“No! I say he’s clean, and I was a Lark!”

“Was.” Holding her knife half extended for a stab, McKee reached out tensely with her free hand to pull Johanna out of the way; and she touched Crawford’s sleeve. Then she let her fingers tap across his waistcoat.

“You’re soaked,” she said. “And shivering.”

“I j-jumped into the river,” he said. “Again. This time I went all the way to the bottom, and — and I very nearly died, but — ghosts found me and revived me.”

“Ghosts did?” said McKee. “What ghosts?”

Crawford exhaled, and McKee got the impression that it was so that his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “Old friends,” he said. “I–I look forward to seeing them again, when my time comes.”

McKee didn’t move for several seconds, then swore and tucked her knife back into its sheath.

“Father,” she said, turning back toward the dimly visible altar, “never mind the annulment, but could we buy some dry clothes from you?”

THE DOVER-TO-DUNKIRK STEAMSHIP WAS a 180-foot side-wheeler, and though its funnel was puffing black smoke into the blue morning sky and the pistons drummed under the deck, two sails on its foremast appeared to be doing most of the work. Beyond the white sails, the remote blue sky met the sea in every direction.

Crawford and McKee and Johanna were huddled with a dozen other passengers just aft of the big starboard wheel cowling. Crawford’s cough had not abated, and he hugged himself inside the overcoat he had bought at a train stop in Maidstone.

“Sorry,” he gasped after the latest coughing fit. “Thames water doesn’t seem to be good for one’s lungs.”

“The cats,” said Johanna, holding on to her hat in the breeze from behind, “probably gave you an extra life or two.”

McKee just shook her head, staring out at the green waves of the English Channel. Crawford knew she was worried about his health, and the money that they were spending much more rapidly than planned, and the prospect of beginning life anew in a country whose inhabitants spoke a language she didn’t know.

They were still an hour out of Dunkirk, and they had been told that the tide would be low there, and that the ship would not dock but land passengers in rowboats.

Crawford said to McKee, “What shall we have for le petit déjeuner, Madame Crawford?”

McKee had learned that much from him on the train. “Frogs,” she said.

“Great bread and cheese,” countered Crawford.

“And wine,” put in Johanna.

“Will we ever come back?” burst out McKee. “Will we ever … see London again?”

Crawford leaned against the tall cowling, feeling the vibration of the big paddle wheel turning inside it.

“I think we had better hope not,” he said.