Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

She shook off the thought — heretical Papist superstition! — and tore the handwritten page into strips and then into tiny fragments and tossed them into the cold fireplace.

She gathered the galley proofs into a stack, the corrected pages facedown on top of the uncorrected ones, then folded the stack and tucked it into the valise beside the desk. She would have to get another of the sisters to assume her duties today and find someone to take the last few days of her scheduled residence — but she needed to see Gabriel immediately.

She glanced at the closet where her street clothes were hung, then impatiently shook her head. There wasn’t time. She hefted the valise, opened the door, and her heels echoed in the empty dormitory as she hurried past the rows of empty beds on her way out to the carriage lane by the stables.

IN THE WEST END, northwest of Waterloo Bridge and the open market at Covent Garden, seven narrow streets met from all directions in a confusion of carriages and wagons and omnibuses below the wedge-shaped buildings that framed an irregular open space. Earl Street stretched east and west, and its balconies and awnings and the hats of the pedestrians on the pavement were lit with the morning sun, while only the chimney pots and roofs of the other streets stood free of the chilly shadows that made the old women around the bakery shops below pull their shawls more tightly around their shoulders. A smoky beam of sunlight crossed the crowded square, occasionally reaching through gaps in the traffic to touch the stone circle where there had once stood a pillar with six sundials on it. The junction had long been known as Seven Dials, for the streets and buildings themselves were said to make a seventh sundial for those who could read it.

Through the crowds of cartwheeling children and adolescent thieves in corduroy trousers and black caps, a peculiar couple shuffled to a corner on the west side. Though the man’s hair and beard were gray as ashes, his shoulders were broad under his flannel coat, and his step was springy — but when his dwarfish companion hesitated at a wide curbside puddle, he crouched and braced himself and lifted it with both hands, then shuffled carefully through the puddle to put the burden down on the pavement with a whoosh of exhaled steam.

The little person was draped in a voluminous Chesterfield overcoat and a baggy slouch hat, with a scarf wrapped around its neck and face, and though now it hopped out of the way of a couple of sprinting boys, its eyes weren’t visible. Long shirtsleeves covered its hands, but in its right hand, half hidden behind the curtain of a lapel, it gripped a violin with a bow clipped to the neck.

Now with its sleeve-shrouded left hand the little figure plucked the bow free, and raised the violin and tucked the chin rest into its scarf and skated the bow over the strings — the hidden fingers of its right hand slid up and down the neck, and the instrument produced a hoarse seesawing note.

The gray-haired man nodded impatiently. “What does it look like?” he snapped. His lip was curled into a perpetual sneer by a scar that ran down his jaw.

He was squinting around at the people hurrying past or slouched against the buildings, and at last he saw the person he was looking for — an old man in a floppy hat and a formal but tattered black coat on the far side of Monmouth Street, his gloved hands holding a broom as if it were a drum major’s baton.

“This way,” said the gray-haired man, starting forward.

The violin emitted a downward-sliding note, but the little person holding it scuttled along after him.

At the corner the old man with the broom had stepped out onto the crushed gravel of the street, waving his broom to halt the horses of an approaching beer wagon, and then he proceeded to sweep the slushy top layer of gravel aside so that three businessmen in bowler hats could cross the street without getting their shoes too muddy. On the far side they paused to give him money, and then, visibly surprised, paused for a little longer while the old man reached into a pocket and gave them change.

He dodged and splashed his way back to the corner where the mismatched couple waited, and he didn’t look at the short figure but grinned at the gray-bearded man.

“Stepping out, Mr. Trelawny?” he said.

Trelawny nodded and handed him a gold sovereign. “I want it all back,” he said.

The crossing sweeper nodded judiciously as if this was an uncommon but not unheard-of transaction, and from his pocket produced two ten-shilling pieces. “There you go, a pound for a pound. I’ll just switch brooms.”

He hobbled to a nearby druggist’s shop with red and purple glass jars in the window; a boy crouched in the recessed entryway beside another broom, and the old man took it and left the one he’d been using.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” said Trelawny dutifully when the old fellow had returned.

“But the old broom knows all the coroners,” returned the old crossing sweeper with a cackle.

Trelawny’s scarred lip kinked in a tired smile at the exchange.

Trelawny glanced left and right at the coaches rattling past on the street, then suddenly darted out in the wake of a fast-moving hansom cab. The old crossing sweeper followed him nimbly, sweeping Trelawny’s boot prints out of the wet road surface.

On the pavement behind them, the dwarf in the slouch hat and overcoat swiveled its covered head in all directions and sawed shrill notes on the violin.

On the far side of the street, Trelawny looked back and couldn’t even see his diminutive onetime companion.

“Well done,” he said to the old man. “You … don’t get into trouble over this?”

The crossing sweeper laughed. “I may be a prodigal son, but I’m still a son. And how should I refuse crossing to,” he added, pointing at his own throat and then at Trelawny’s, “the bridge himself?”

Trelawny pursed his lips irritably at the reminder, but he nodded and hurried away up Queen Street, the narrowest of the streets that met at the Seven Dials.

He remembered this area of the City as it had been in the late 1830s, before the track for New Oxford Street had been leveled through the tangled courts and densely packed houses of the St. Giles rookery. He smiled and softly hummed an old song as he hurried along the crowded pavement, thinking of streets and houses that were just memories now — Carrier Street, with Mother Dowling’s undiscriminating lodging house… Buckeridge Street, where lords and vagabonds mingled in Joe Banks’s Hare and Hounds public house… Jones Court off Bainbridge Street, where Trelawny had once drunkenly surprised a roomful of his enemies by riding a donkey into their midst…

Trelawny’s eyes were relaxed in a wide-focus stare, and his hands swung loosely at his sides, the fingers slightly spread. He stepped into an alley on his right, and though there was scarcely six feet of pavement between the windows and doors of the buildings on either side, dozens of figures moved in the shadows. Many were young children huddled around adults who might be their parents and who appeared to be offering broken trinkets for sale on tables set up against the black brick walls, but most of the inhabitants of the alley seemed to be idlers, men who were of working age but who had no evident occupation.

As Trelawny strode toward a door at the far end of the alley, two of these men stepped into his way.

“Ho, Mahomet,” drawled the shorter one, “first visit was free.” His gray felt top hat might have been salvaged from the river, and his blackened toes stuck out from the ragged edge of his pavement-length coat. “Second visit costs money.”

His companion, skeletally thin in the remains of a frock coat, exposed toothless gums in a grin. “Fork over your purse, Ahmed.”