Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

On the desk behind Sister Christina lay the neglected galley proofs of a collection of her poetry, soon to be published by Macmillan — but it was her reluctant duty to confiscate from the new girls the books of poetry that they frequently arrived with. The books were often gifts from former clients, and therefore considered dangerous reminders, and in any case the romantic fancies of modern verse seemed likely to be lures back into sin. But the girls nevertheless often quoted poets like Byron and Coleridge and Browning, and, when they were invited to choose new names for themselves, regularly chose names like Haidee or Juliet or Christabel. A few, like Adelaide McKee two years ago, resolutely kept their old names and stayed in London, and Sister Christina worried and prayed for them — especially Adelaide.

The literacy of many of these ex-prostitutes had surprised Christina when she began volunteering here four years ago. She had assumed that London’s population of streetwalkers was exclusively drawn from the lowest levels of poverty and ignorance, but she had discovered that this was by no means always the case; the girls weren’t encouraged to talk about their pasts, but their accents and table manners often hinted at respectable middle-class origins, as did the clue — gathered from their admittance forms — that many of them had more than one baptismal name.

Christina turned and looked warily at the sheet of paper lying on the worn floor. She could see from here that it was covered with lines in her own handwriting, but she had no memory of writing it. She shivered.

She was still unmarried at the age of thirty-one, living with her mother and two of her three siblings in a house in Albany Street just two streets from Regent’s Park, and some of her friends thought this work was perilous to her own innocence and virtue; her brother Gabriel had written a poem in which a prostitute was described as: a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul…

If she was feeling facetious, she would sometimes reply to their misgivings with a quote from Emma Shepherd’s An Outstretched Hand to the Fallen —“the purer, the more ignorant of vice the lady is who seeks them, the greater the influence she has”—but to herself she could admit that there probably wasn’t an inmate in the house as much in need of redemption as herself.

She had found a refuge in her volunteer residency work here, at least for one fortnight every two or three months, and Reverend Oliver, the warden, had shown her some tricks for “keeping the devils out,” as he put it — the iron-barred decorative openings in the garden wall, the mirrors in the entry hall, the garlic in all the window boxes.

Her sister, Maria, was doing work for the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, and possibly finding similar protections there. Christina hoped so — Maria would never discuss such things, and in fact had never referred to that evening seventeen years ago in a twilit field, when the two of them had given Greek funeral honors to their father’s temporarily buried little black statue.

Christina had lately written a long poem about a girl who surrenders to supernatural temptation, to her ruin, and her sister who rescues her by exposing herself to the same perils. The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems.

Christina had restored the little statue — rendered inert, she had believed then — to its usual perch on her father’s shelf when she had returned from her visit to Maria in the country, and her father had never mentioned the thing again. He had died nine years later, and his last words before he hiccuped into his handkerchief and choked and expired had been Ah Dio, ajuatami Tu! Which meant, roughly, God help me! Their mother, though grieving, had gathered up all the copies in the house of his book, Amor Platonica, and burned them, along with the unpublished notes he’d made on the Kabalistic idea of the transmigration of souls. Nobody, not even Christina’s skeptical brother William, had asked why.

Christina had dreamed of her father since his death: always in the dream he was sitting across a table from her in a small room lit by candles, talking earnestly; but she couldn’t make out the words in his droning monologue. After a few minutes, she would lean forward and watch his lips intently and concentrate, and he would become visibly alarmed — apparently at the prospect of her comprehending his speech, which she realized he was unable to halt — and he would lean across the table and stick his fingers into her ears, so that she could no longer hear his voice, though she could see his lips still moving helplessly.

Always she lived with a conviction that at the age of fourteen she had brought a curse on her family by quickening that little statue with her blood.

Neither Christina nor Maria had married; their brother Gabriel was more stubborn and had married two years ago, at the age of thirty-two — his wife had borne him a dead daughter shortly afterward and was now, God help her, very ill herself. William had been engaged, in spite of Christina’s oblique warnings — and Gabriel’s too, she suspected — but he had canceled the engagement in bewilderment when the young lady insisted that it should be an entirely celibate marriage.

Amor Platonica indeed, thought Christina now as at last she crouched to pick up the sheet of paper. The young lady had not perhaps been as unreasonable as William had thought.

The paper was a page from a story she recognized. She had written it out last year and had submitted it to Thackeray’s Cornhill magazine, but after it was rejected, and she reread it, she had found herself sickened by William’s comment that it was the best story she’d ever written — because, though it had been her hand that had held the pen, she was now convinced that she was not the one who had conceived and composed it.

She had burned it — but since late December she had found her hand writing it out again, in moments when her mind strayed from whatever she’d meant to write.

Its title was “Folio Q,” and she suspected the Q was meant to indicate the German word quelle, source. It was about a man who didn’t dare look into mirrors, and instead imposed his own face onto the people he loved.

She suspected that the actual author was her uncle, John Polidori, who had killed himself in 1821, forty-one years ago. It was clear that he had not, after all, been laid to rest when she and Maria had temporarily buried the little statue.

She glanced at the handwritten page — then stepped to the window for better light, her heart beating more rapidly, for this newest page was a scene that had not been in the story as she had originally written it.

When she finished reading the page, she stepped to the desk and slapped around among the long galley proof sheets, for the handwritten page ended in midsentence — there was, though, no subsequent page.

But she needed to find out how the scene ended. Gabriel needed to know.

I could sit down and hold a pen over a blank sheet, she thought, and open my mind to him, deliberately this time, instead of inadvertently. He could write another page, or several.

All at once her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Yes, she thought excitedly, I’ll give him my hand, let him in just to that extent, just for a little while…

Then she clutched the crucifix on the rope around her waist, and for a moment she wished she were Catholic instead of Anglican, and that the rope was a rosary, so that she could pray to the Virgin for help — for she had sensed that her sinful eagerness was reciprocated from some direction, requited. She couldn’t say an Our Father right now — ever since the age of fourteen she had instinctively feared the all-seeing God of the Old Testament — and even Christ would not shelter a soul who couldn’t bear to entirely relinquish its one most precious sin … but the Virgin Mary might understand…