Hide Me Among the Graves

EPILOGUE

THE OLD FIELDSTONE All Saints Church at Birchington-on-Sea, east of the Thames Estuary in northeast Kent, was separated from the North Sea only by a gently descending mile of sand and sparse weeds, but the churchyard was bright with flowering irises and lilacs, and Christina Rossetti had brought woodspurge and forget-me-nots. The angular gray stone steeple was the only interruption of the bright blue sky.

Gabriel had died five days earlier, on the evening of Easter Sunday, at the age of fifty-three. The cause of death had been kidney failure, or a stroke, or the ravages of breaking a chloral hydrate addiction by switching to whisky and morphia. A local doctor had pronounced that Gabriel had simply not wanted to live any longer.

Birchington was a long train ride from Victoria Station in London, but Gabriel had been staying out here in therapeutic retreat, and he had been adamant that he was not to be buried at Highgate Cemetery with Lizzie and his father. No one had argued with him.

The coffin had been carried from the church down to the grave on the shoulders of William Rossetti and five men Crawford didn’t recognize, and the priest was now praying over it. The walls of the grave were straightly cut down into the chalk.

Swinburne was absent — at forty-five he had reputedly become something of a penitent hermit, living out in Putney and forswearing drink. Of course his poetry was technically competent but uninspired these days, but he seemed grateful for his deliverance from it; it was said that he even remembered Trelawny fondly.

Trelawny had died only last August, at the age of eighty-eight, having lived actively for four years after Crawford cut the stone ball from his neck.

Christina, at least, had apparently noticed the four figures hanging back by the church porch, and she hobbled up the path to where they stood.

“Adelaide!” she said, squinting in the sunlight but not cringing from it. She touched an old scar on her hand. “And Mr. Crawford. Your beard is white now! And — Johanna… Foyle, is it, now?” When Johanna nodded, Christina turned to the fourth person in the group, a diffident and clean-shaven man of about thirty. “And Mr. Foyle himself?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, bowing.

“I’m sorry I was too ill to attend the wedding … two years ago already?”

Crawford nodded. “At the church in Bozier’s Court.”

“I remember it well.”

“Trelawny was there,” said Johanna. “Muttering heresies.”

“And his granddaughter? Rose? Was she at the ceremony?”

“No,” said McKee. “I gather she stayed on at the Magdalen house, working there now.”

“Ah. I haven’t been back there in years.” Christina shook her head, and her gray hair blew around her face as she turned to look back down the shallow slope to the churchyard. Absently she blew aside a stray lock.

“No mirrors in Gabriel’s coffin,” she said, “and William has three children now, the youngest a two-year-old girl. All well, and I don’t know if he even remembers now where the bit of Shelley’s jawbone is.”

Christina glanced at Mr. Foyle and seemed reassured when he nodded, clearly acquainted with the whole story.

“I’ve — been to Confession,” she said, “at a Catholic Church, though it was hard. I truly think you three would benefit from doing the same.” She sighed and looked at Crawford. “But if it weren’t for your actions, I believe we would all be very different people now, and incalculably worse, living in a London like Dante’s Inferno.”

“Or dead under an inverted London,” said Johanna.

“That too, that too,” Christina said distractedly, staring again down the slope at the mourners and the coffin. “I should rejoin the others.” She blinked, then focused again on Crawford. “I’m glad you have your spouse and child,” she said, and Crawford could hear the effort it took for her not to emphasize some of the words. “And I … truly do forgive you for the … sometimes stressful changes you brought us.”

Johanna’s brown hair was longer now, pinned back against the wind. She cocked her head and smiled at Christina. “We forgive you too,” she said, “for the same.”

Christina blinked. “Oh, yes. That’s — yes, thank you. And may the — the Father forgive us all.”

She shivered in the sunlight and then began hobbling back down the path to her brother’s burial.