Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

An unguessable number of people were sitting in clusters of chairs or standing beside a long table to his left. There were no white ties on the visible gentlemen, and his fretfulness about his own frock coat and cravat abated; but McKee would be coming in behind him in a moment, so he hurried to the farthest ring of chairs. Long curtains indicated tall windows at intervals along the length of the room, and dark paintings were hung with their frames nearly edge to edge all over the walls, extending so high up that surely nobody could ever look at the top several rows, even in daylight.

Looking back, he could see the dim shapes of faces looking after him, but when McKee stepped into the room, they turned toward her. Grateful that he had only momentarily been the object of attention, Crawford sat down in an empty chair in the nearest circle, to the left of a lean, gray-bearded gentleman, on the far side of whom stood a tall woman in what seemed to be a toga.

The old man was staring at him, and Crawford nodded and said quietly, “How do you do?”

“Stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” the old man growled, and he looked away.

On Crawford’s left, a young man in a lacy collar giggled softly and whispered, “That’s Edward John Trelawny, the great friend of Shelley’s.”

“Oh.” The people in the chairs around him seemed to be looking expectantly toward the long table along the wall opposite the curtained windows, but Crawford glanced curiously at the old man on his right.

He had heard of Trelawny. The man had reportedly been a close friend of the poets Byron and Shelley, and a few years ago he had published a sensational memoir of their last days. And Crawford recalled that the man had published an autobiography some thirty years ago, recounting his bloody adventures as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. Crawford remembered hearing that Trelawny had joined Byron in fighting to free Greece from the Turks, and had married a Greek maiden in a cave on Mount Parnassus — perhaps that’s who the tall woman was.

Crawford looked past the young man on his left, peering to see where McKee might have alighted, but he couldn’t make her out in the red-tinted dimness. He wondered uneasily if she had found Carpace.

“I am sorry to announce,” said a woman’s strong voice then from the direction of the table across the room, “that our guest speaker will not be joining us—”

Trelawny snorted, and the woman standing beyond him seemed to stir. Crawford heard exclamations of dismay in German and French from nearby circles. The man to Crawford’s left was now peering at the speaker through a pair of opera glasses.

“—because of a sudden illness encountered on the river this morning. We hope to have her back with us soon.”

Crawford hiked up in his chair to try to get a better view of the speaker — she appeared to be in charge, and McKee had said Carpace was hosting this affair — but he could only see that she was very wide and wore some sort of tall ornamental headdress.

“Therefore,” the woman went on, “we’ll proceed directly to individual recitals and political dialogues.”

Crawford heard the notes of a flute start up somewhere in the middle of the long room, and farther away a man’s voice began singing something dirgelike, and a young woman seated across from Crawford in this ring of chairs waved a sheaf of papers and announced, “If I may, I will read a passage from my Lunar Encomium .”

A portly man beside her stood up and fetched a candle from a nearby table, and then he knelt by her and solicitously held the candle beside her elbow so that she could see the pages.

Trelawny leaned forward while she read the first several lines of her poem, about which Crawford was only able to discern that it was in iambic pentameter, but Trelawny soon leaned back and yawned audibly. None of the other people in the circle took note of it — apparently Trelawny was expected to be rude.

After perhaps a minute, the young woman stopped reciting, and since it was at the end of a line and the man with the candle had wobbled to his feet, Crawford concluded that it was over, but he didn’t clap his hands until several others in the circle did.

The young man to Crawford’s left sighed loudly and said, “Isn’t she marvelous? So very like a gold-lit cloud at dawn.” He beamed expectantly at Crawford.

“Incredibly like,” said Crawford. The young man apparently expected more, so Crawford added, “It’s uncanny.”

Behind him, Trelawny laughed, and when Crawford turned around he saw that the old man had stood up and was walking away with his Junoesque robed companion.

Looking back down the room, Crawford saw McKee now — she was walking toward the woman who had addressed the crowd.

“May I borrow your opera glasses?” Crawford said to the young man beside him.

“My dear fellow,” the man replied, lifting the ribbon over his head and handing them to him.

“You’re very kind.” The focus was sharp, and in a moment Crawford was viewing the woman as if up close; she was very fat, with tiny dark eyes that weren’t made to seem bigger by the kohl dusted around her eyelids.

He saw the moment when she noticed McKee approaching — the woman’s eyes widened and then narrowed, and she turned away, toward the table. From his viewpoint at the end of the room farthest from the doors, Crawford was able to see her poke the fingers of one hand into the neckline of her orange silk dress and lift out some small object. She bent over a row of wine glasses, then replaced the object in her bosom and straightened and turned around.

For several seconds she made a show of looking around at the various groups in the room, and then her gaze fixed on someone closer, and Crawford’s view was blocked by the back of McKee’s hat.

“Thank you,” Crawford said, hastily handing back the opera glasses.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering how he would know if McKee’s meeting with Carpace were to “go wrong”—what had that business been with the wine glasses? — and then he decided, a bit breathlessly, that even letting McKee confront the old woman alone would be wrong enough, and he began threading his way rapidly around the chattering groups toward the two women.

He had two fingers in the pocket of his waistcoat, nervously ready to pull out the vial of garlic and bite it open if some roaring monster appeared in the smoky air.

He approached the table from behind Carpace, if that was indeed who the fat woman was, and McKee had not noticed him yet. Carpace had slid two wine glasses forward across the tablecloth, but she was looking at McKee, and so Crawford reached out and reversed the glasses.

Then he stepped back and said, “Am I intruding, ladies?”

McKee blinked at him in alarm and glanced around the room, but no devils seemed to be manifesting themselves. Still, he noticed that she stepped back to slightly increase the distance between them — and for just a moment he was distracted by her parted lips and wide eyes and chestnut hair, and the irrelevant realization that she was in fact very pretty.

“Hard to say,” she answered. “Mr. Crawford, this is Miss Carpace.”

Crawford looked away from McKee to the old woman.

Carpace turned to him with a smile that wrinkled her heavily powdered face. She was holding a decanter of red wine, and now she filled the two glasses and carefully handed one to McKee.

“ Enchante , Mr. Crawford,” she said in a husky voice, “but Miss McKee is a sad hand at foreign names.” She waved her glass at the decanter. “Would you care for some wine? You must be the new poet.”

“No, thank you,” Crawford said, resolving, though, to pour a fresh glass for himself at the first opportunity. He too took a moment to look uneasily up toward the dark moldings in the corners of the vast room.