Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

my dear ones my francesca

William was peering at it. “I don’t think…” he began slowly, but the disk was moving again:

christina vivace mia

“… that that’s our uncle,” William finished.

“No,” said Christina, careful to keep any disappointment out of her voice or manner. “No, it’s… Papa.”

“Why is he writing in English?”

Christina recalled the conversation she’d had with her father seventeen years ago, when he had let her take the tiny Polidori statue. “I think he uses English when he’s — ashamed of himself.”

“Wha — why should he be ashamed of himself?”

Because he used me, Christina thought, sacrificed my honor to his devil, in the hope that the devil would … restore his sight, his fortune, his youth. A dishonorable bargain, and one in which he was cheated to boot.

And she recalled what Trelawny had said this afternoon. “Ghosts are ashamed of being dead,” she said.

William stepped back to the center of the parlor. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, William, it’s—”

William, of course, with his generally mocking attitude, had never been told the story of Christina’s catastrophic intimacy with their father’s statue, and she didn’t want him to learn it tonight.

“It won’t happen unless I’m alone,” she said. “I’ll be safe — I’ll go to where they hire boats, by the Adelphi wharfs.”

William was frowning. “But I’m one of his children too. Why would he — he didn’t say that you had to come alone.”

“Dear William! I’m sorry. But this time it must be just me. You can contact him afterward, and meet him … or his ghost, at any rate.”

“But isn’t his ghost him? ”

“Not … not much. Most of him will have gone on, though I know what you think about Heaven and Hell. This fraction of him might be — a Catholic might say that it was — his participation in Purgatory.”

“I — for God’s sake, it’s after nine o’clock, Christina! I insist on going with you.”

“If you do, nothing will happen. We’ll take an uneventful walk by the river and come home again. I’ll be perfectly safe alone, I promise you.” She smiled at him. “You know I’ll get my way in this.”

After another few seconds of frowning disapprovingly, William looked away. “Do you have money?” he asked in a flat voice. “You’ll want a cab both ways.”

“Well, if you could,” said Christina, mentally adding as always, “lend me a pound…?”

William pulled his coin purse from his waistcoat pocket, snapped it open, and handed her several coins.

“Even so,” he said gruffly, “tell him, if you would, that I — love him.” He grimaced. “If his ghost is there, and even if it’s not much of him.”

“I will!”

Christina kissed him on the cheek and hurried to the hall to get her things.

GABRIEL HAD TO TAKE most of Lizzie’s weight as they clumped and scuffled up the dark stairs at Chatham Place, and when he had sat her down on the bed and turned up the gas flame he wiped his face with a handkerchief. Laudanum and the closed windows gave the room a stuffy sickroom smell.

“It’s nine thirty,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve got to go.” On Monday nights he taught a drawing class at the Working Men’s College in Great Titchfield Street. “I’ll be back at eleven or so.”

“Is that tonight? Miss the class tonight,” she said, falling back exhaustedly across the bed. Her closed eyes were smudges of darkness. “I’m afraid he’ll come to me, or she will, if you’re gone.”

He or she, Gabriel thought. How are we to free her from two of them?

“I can’t,” he said. “The students will all be there.”

“Gabriel, I don’t want to have to — do what I’d have to do, to resist them!”

Gabriel forced himself not to roll his eyes in impatience. “You’re safe here, indoors in this house, and I’ll only be a couple of hours.”

“Bloody lot you know,” she muttered, turning toward the wall. Her dress was going to need pressing before she could wear it again.

“What was that?”

She rolled around to face him, her eyes wide with apparent fright. “Stay, Gabriel! I don’t want to be left with nothing but Walter’s counsel.”

“Walter! Walter is dead because your — your new lovers were jealous! Walter’s just a half-wit ghost now.” He blinked away tears impatiently. “Walter’s not the— father of your child .”

Lizzie shook herself and looked around the dim-lit room and absently smoothed out the pleats of her dress. Gabriel wearily recognized one of her abrupt changes of mood.

She muttered something of which he caught only the words my child.

“What?” he snapped.

She sighed, calm now. “Nothing. Go to your school. Your students matter more to you than I do.”

“Damn it, Guggums—”

“You were perfectly beastly to me at dinner.”

“I was—? Who was it made such a scene that we had to run out? Algy must think you’re insane.”

“Algy loves me like a sister. You love me as a model for pictures.” Gabriel started to object, but she interrupted, “Give me my laudanum bottle, and then go.”

“You’ve had quite enough of that damned stuff. You hardly know where you are these days. I don’t—”

She rolled her eyes and shifted on the bed as if to stand up. “Can’t you do even that for me? Never mind, I’ll get it for myself.”

Furiously, Gabriel snatched up the bottle and strode to the bed and shoved it into her hand. “Here,” he said, “take the lot!”

She was sobbing weakly behind him as he strode out the bedroom door and down the stairs.

CHRISTINA HAD HAD TO knock at the side window of the hansom cab on the corner, waking the cabbie, and now that she had climbed out at the river end of Villiers Street ten minutes later, he swung down from his perch at the back and stepped up into the cab again to resume his interrupted sleep.

“I’ll be right here when you’re ready to return,” he said gruffly, pocketing her shilling and pulling his collar up and his hat down. “Unless somebody hires me first.”

“I shall hope that you remain undiscovered,” said Christina, shivering in the chilly fog that swirled up the street from the river.

The cab’s right wheel was up over the curb on the pavement, below a dark building with a crane and a wide, shuttered door dimly visible overhead on the second floor, in a shadowed and mist-veiled corner of the street, and it seemed very possible that no late-night revelers would venture beyond the crowded, jostling cab stand under the streetlamp a dozen yards back up the street.

Even on this cold Monday night the fog glowed back there around a place called Gatti’s Music Hall, and a man was out front shouting through a speaking trumpet about the musical show inside, which was apparently the source of the occasional spirited chorus of “Hee-haw” that rang between the blurred buildings and out across the river.

Beyond the chest-high brick wall along the river-side lane, the river itself was invisible in what seemed to be a solid cloud descended out of the sky — and she remembered her father once saying that the clouds of night were not the same as the clouds of day.

On the far side of the river, she knew, were warehouses and the ironworks and the tall shot tower, where molten lead was dropped from a height into cold water to make the little balls men shot birds with, but tonight those places all might as well be on the moon — the river of fog seemed to extend out to the sky, and with an odd thrill she remembered her childhood dream of the Sea-People Chorus, the thousands of ghosts in the river waving jointless arms at the night sky.