by Tim Powers
Page 31
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 seances, 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.
