Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Crawford realized that he was smiling in spite of himself. “Well — on the whole, that would be a festive moment, wouldn’t it? The Second Coming, Jesus arriving to judge the living and the dead? You couldn’t have been much of a sinner at the age of eleven.”

“As opposed to later, you mean. Shall I tell you how I came to be ruined, eight years after that?”

Crawford’s smile had disappeared. “Certainly not, Miss McKee. I think we’re almost at our destination. Do you suppose there’ll be a dinner?”

He had obtained with no trouble from his dog-owning client a note of invitation to the salon, but the note, written on the back of her calling card, simply said, Please welcome into your company John Crawford, a poet, and his guest. No reference to dinner. He had taken McKee’s advice and copied out twenty lines from a middle canto of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, just in case.

She shrugged. “This isn’t my pasture any more than it’s yours. It sounded like more talking than eating — which ought to mean beer, at least. I grew up in the country, in Sudbury. You know it?”

“Certainly.”

“In ’54, when I was nineteen, I was visiting cousins in London; one night we got separated in the crowd in Mayfair. I was dazzled by all the bright gas jets and music and the fine-dressed ladies and gentlemen … as I thought at the time. The elegant scene. And I got lost, and found myself in a dark street with the crowds all somehow gone, and an old woman in an open doorway spoke to me. I told her I’d lost my way and asked her how to get back to Langham Street, where my aunt and cousins lived, though I didn’t know if it was in Soho or Fitzrovia or St. Pancras or what — I’ve heard it’s in Fitzrovia—”

“Yes,” said Crawford.

“—but she swore she knew it and would have her groom escort me back, but first I must come in and have a cup of coffee to take the chill off. I did. The coffee was drugged. When I woke up after noon the next day, I learned that at least one man had visited me. I was kept prisoner for a week and then wholesaled with two other girls to Carpace across the river.” In the dimness he saw her raise one hand and let it fall. “There’s no going back.”

“I’m sorry,” Crawford said stiffly, squinting through the front window into the light-stained fog ahead of the driver. Then he glanced at the pale oval of her face and said, “And … and I’m sorry.”

“Do you have siblings? I don’t remember.”

“No.”

“If I were — your sister, say — what would your feelings be?”

“I’d want to find that old woman who drugged you. I’d want to kill her.” He sat back, wishing he’d brought a flask. “I want to kill her now.”

“That’s something.”

Crawford was startled then by a squeak from her purse — she had evidently brought her bird along. She went on, “I imagine there’ll be sandwiches or relish trays or things of that sort — artistic folk won’t stay if there’s no food or drink at all.”

“Stands to reason,” he agreed. “Haven’t you — sorry, I ought not to ask you personal questions.”

“‘Ought not’?” she said sharply. “‘Personal questions’? Why are we in this cab?”

Crawford inhaled through his teeth and nodded, conceding the point. “To find out what became of our daughter,” he said. “Fair enough. So — haven’t you, now that you’re free of the Carpace woman, tried to contact your family? How many years has it been?”

“It’s been eight years. I ran away from Carpace’s house to the Magdalen Penitentiary four years ago, and I’ve been out of there for two years, in the Hail Mary trade. No, I haven’t tried to approach them. My father is a curate and my mother teaches at the church school … if they’re still alive.” She gave a hitching laugh. “That was a personal question, wasn’t it?”

“They wouldn’t … blame you, surely, for having simply stumbled into a trap.”

“I hope no reasonable person would blame me. No, they’d be saddened by it but overjoyed to see me alive and restored. And I would dearly love to see them again, before they die.” She glanced at Crawford and then away. “But I love them, you see — I think they’re safe from the devil I’ve acquired, as long as I don’t go near them.”

Several seconds went by with just the noise of the cab and the passing blurs of light outside the window glass. “The, uh, Hail Mary trade?” he said finally.

“A veterinarian, and you don’t know the term? Aves.” She sang three lines from the Irish song “Danny Boy”: “‘And if I’m dead, as dead I well may be, / You’ll come and find the place where I am lying, / And kneel and say an ave there for me.’”

“Avis, aves,” said Crawford, nodding. “Birds. The bird business?”

“Exactly. Songbirds. It overlaps with some other trades — gypsy soul-catchers, absinthe-sellers, the eyeglasses men.”

Crawford was curious about these, and about how they overlapped with the songbird trade, but the cab had pulled up in front of one of a row of tall narrow houses; a gas lamp shone beside the door at the top of the steps, and the curtained windows glowed upstairs and downstairs.

“You pay the cabbie and go to the door first,” said McKee. “When they open the door, I’ll join you as you go in.” Seeing his puzzled look, she added, “You and I ought not to be together under a naked night sky.”

“I take your meaning,” said Crawford slowly, remembering their calamitous meeting seven years ago on Waterloo Bridge. What the hell am I doing here, he thought bleakly — but just see it through, see it through. “I’d forgotten.”

McKee caught his arm. “Now I think of it — once we’ve been admitted, let’s stay on opposite sides of the room.”

“What — why? Who am I to talk to?”

“We don’t know who or what might have been invited inside. Did you bring your garlic?”

Crawford touched his waistcoat pocket. “I did, but—”

“So did I. I think we’d be well advised to play this as if we were outdoors. Might be nothing would happen, but just in—”

“Why am I even here ?” demanded Crawford — quietly, for the cabbie had stepped down from his perch and was standing outside the door now. “If I’m not to be anywhere near whatever you’re doing?”

“Watch me — if it goes wrong, barge in, devils or no devils.”

Crawford nodded tightly. “Garlic flying. Aye aye.” He picked up his hat and opened the door, wincing at the cold night air, and stepped down to the gritty pavement. He paid the cabbie and then tapped quickly up the steps to the house door.

His knock was answered by a middle-aged man whose old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings indicated that he was a servant; Crawford handed him his hat and the dog owner’s calling card.

The man glanced at the card and looked down the steps to the cab. “And guest, sir?”

Crawford stepped past him into the entry hall and nodded, hearing the cab door slam below. “She, uh, catches cold easily,” he said. “I didn’t want her to stand in the chilly air.”

“Of course, sir. Guests are in the library and sitting room, through those doors.”

Crawford strode toward the indicated doors, and another servant pulled them open. Crawford stepped through, moving quickly to maintain a distance between himself and McKee; and he found that dozens of people in a dimly lit room all now seemed to be staring at him. He nodded vaguely and shuffled away from the clear area of carpet in front of the doors.

It was certainly a large room, with a very high ceiling, though its dimensions were hard to guess since the only illumination was dozens of candles; no, there were several gas jets too, but they were enclosed in thick red glass shades. He could smell coffee and vanilla under a haze of cigar smoke, and he hoped there would be more substantial fare than just coffee and cakes.