Hide Me Among the Graves

by Tim Powers

Page 9

 

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

  CHAPTER FOUR

  [O]ne feels again within the accursed circle. The skulls & bones rattle, the goblins keep mumbling, & the owls beat their obscene wings again. . . Meanwhile, to step out of the ring is death & damnation.

  - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter to William Bell Scott, 1853

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "You promised Doctor Acland that you'd give this up. He says it makes you sicker. "

  "Seances," said Lizzie weakly, throwing herself back in the chair. "This isn't - "

  "Oh, don't, Gug - you know he didn't mean the groups, the hand-holding! You know he meant - talking to dead people!"

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

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

  He opened and closed his mouth several times before he spoke. "I've done everything I - we're practically on the river - and - "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  there fair ne'er

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

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

  Gabriel could only read the next line as,

  parnassus has its flowers

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

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

  And the pencil oracle had scrawled,

  dark river you c
ome soon

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

  Below that Lizzie had written, Must I die soon?

  - to which the meandering line replied,

  or never

  Lizzie countered, You know why I can't.

  - and Deverell's faint handwriting followed with,

  worse for both you if you stay

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

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

  Lizzie's next line was, I can't.

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

  ask his sisters are there in your soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Not primarily yours," said Christina.

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

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

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

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

  "Automatic writing?" she asked.

  "Ah - she does it with a sort of sliding pencil device - "

  "Bring it along," said Christina, starting down the hall.

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

  Both women were studying the pencil lines on the sheet.

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

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

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

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

  Maria closed her eyes and shook her head.

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