Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“Lift your feet,” he said.

She did, and a moment later she was standing beside the old man in an unlighted slant-ceilinged room, hugging him and trembling.

“Still a bastard,” she whispered. He patted the top of her hat and then turned to the window to help her father in.

When all four of them were safely in the room, peering nervously at the cobwebby banks of wooden filing cabinets that hid all the walls, her father finally took off his hat and glared at Trelawny.

“Did you mean to trade Johanna for your granddaughter?”

“Keep — your voice down,” said Trelawny, panting. “We’re trespassing here, wherever this is.” He flexed his shaking fingers. “No, you fool, I don’t want that thing to have any bride at all. You think I want London destroyed? But I’m eighty-four years old — I can’t sprint across rooftops anymore, or swim the river, or — and your daughter knows his places.”

McKee went to the short door and opened it; after peering into the hallway beyond, she shut the door and stepped back to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. “Nobody about. But do let’s be quiet.” She turned to Trelawny, and the expression on her narrow face was one of concern. “You love your granddaughter.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said the old man. He lowered himself carefully to the floor and stretched his legs out. “Ah! I’ve only seen her twice, and the second time was when her mother was ordering me out of her house. Still, she’s a nice child.” He sighed. “It’s more that she’s my granddaughter, you see.”

“You … care about her, then, as much as you care about anything.”

Trelawny shrugged and nodded. “That sums it up.”

“Let my husband cut that stone out of your throat.”

Trelawny smiled at McKee. “No.”

“You’ll be saving two girls, Johanna here and your granddaughter, this girl Rose.”

“There’s other ways to stop Polidori,” said Trelawny irritably, “without killing me.”

“My husband is a skilled surgeon—”

Trelawny raised a hand to interrupt her. “And we need to find Rose in any case,” he said. “We can’t leave her clean but down a well somewhere.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “We need to get hold of the damned Rossettis again.”

Johanna sat down too. “I am helping in this,” she told her parents as she brushed out her short brown hair with her gloved fingers. “I can’t not.”

Crawford sighed and joined them on the floor. “The Rossettis? Are they still alive? What can they do?”

Trelawny lowered his hands and stared at the dim ceiling. “Five years ago! — I gave William Rossetti a protection. He had put together a book of Shelley’s poems, and I knew Shelley, and I helped William with the book and got to know him. I admire him, he’s a friend. And he was thinking about asking a woman to marry him, and he had … no conception of the peril he’d be putting her into, much less any children they might have. His brother and sisters knew, and I suppose they tried to tell him, but he was skeptical. Scientific. So I gave him my piece of Shelley’s jawbone, scorched from the funeral pyre. It deflects the attention of … those things.”

Johanna blinked at him. “You never offered me that.”

“I thought you were off to America. If you’d all just go to America and stay there, I wouldn’t have all these problems.”

“You wouldn’t have problems!” said Crawford, and he began coughing again.

“So William has the Shelley jawbone?” said McKee quickly.

“That’s right. He gave it back to me at first, after showing it around to his friends as if it were a — a morbid relic or souvenir —he told me he really had no use for it. It was unsanitary. But three years ago he finally did get married, and his wife started having nightmares, when she could sleep at all, and their first child miscarried, and her brother whom they were both fond of flopped down dead at the age of nineteen — and William came back to me then, and begged me to give it back to him! I did, and now his wife’s recovered and he’s got a baby daughter who seems healthy.”

“‘London destroyed,’” echoed Crawford belatedly. “How would the dead boy destroy London, just by getting a bride?”

“The dead boy is a child, or product, at any rate, of Miss B.,” said Trelawny. “You remember her, I’m sure! She had largely assumed that poor woman Rossetti married, Dizzy or some such name; you remember her funeral. And if Polidori can raise up from the dead a girl who’s a member of his family — and he’s choosy about that! — the two can, if we stretch the term, marry.”

McKee started to interrupt, but Trelawny frowned and went on, “The thing that is Miss B. is British, as British as the Cotswold Hills; in a sense she is the Cotswold Hills! And the thing that is Polidori is European, specifically Alpine. The offspring of their families, of their continents, would exert an actual physical tug across the Channel.” He nodded at Crawford. “Earthquake.”

“To destroy London ?” said Crawford. “There are never earthquakes in London.” He paused. “Well, until today.”

“A minor local one,” agreed Trelawny, “just from your daughter and the dead boy being in proximity. And Rossetti’s house shook, if you recall, when they were briefly in proximity in his bedroom seven years ago! And she, Miss B., destroyed London with an earthquake eighteen hundred years ago, when her resurrected British daughter gave birth to a child, so to speak, by a resurrected Roman soldier. She’d very much like to do it again.”

“Did the … child live?” asked McKee.

“The child was the earthquake,” said Trelawny. “It lived less than a minute.”

Johanna could see that her parents didn’t believe this story, but she remembered a vision she’d had seven years ago, in which astronomically vast wheels had pulled a city apart, rupturing underground rivers and toppling towers.

“I don’t have those hide shoes anymore,” she said. “Let’s get this jawbone before sundown.”

IN THE DIMMING daylight to the west, Christina Rossetti could see the Charing Cross Hotel and railway station, and she remembered the Hungerford Market that had stood where the hotel and railway station were now.

Her dress, shawl, and bonnet were black.

“Oh, I’ve outlived my London,” she said, turning to William, who was holding her elbow. “With Maria gone, I feel like a ghost myself. This modern London is for people like your new son, not for me.”

They were here so that she could show him the spot where she had talked with their father’s ghost fourteen years earlier, and the two of them were standing below the central arch of the York water gate — but the stairs that had once led her down to the watermen’s shed on the river shore now ended, after only two steps, at a wide gravel pavement, beyond which stretched a broad landscape of snow-covered lawns and paths. The new Victoria Embankment had pushed the river shore a hundred yards out from this spot, and from here she couldn’t see the water at all.

“It was … there,” she told William, pointing at the snowy ground to her right, “about twenty feet below the surface now, where I talked with the watermen. I wonder if their shed is still down there, buried!”