Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“We really will let you know,” said Maria from the couch. Though unlikely to have any romantic attachments herself, or because of that, she had enormous sympathy for star-crossed lovers.

“But,” added Christina with an apologetic smile, “you must trust me to apprise you of any word of her as soon as I learn anything. These visits, so far out of your way—”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Crawford. He smiled at her, deepening the lines in his cheeks. “We were allies for a while, weren’t we?”

“In a campaign that succeeded,” agreed Christina. “A campaign that is over,” she added, perhaps a bit more forcefully than she meant to. “My uncle — the devil that wore my uncle — is dispersed in the grave.”

“And we part ways,” he agreed, stepping toward the hall. “‘One watching for the mere bright day’s delight, one longing for the night.’”

It was a couplet from Goblin Market. He nodded and walked out of the house, and Maria got up to watch him out the window.

“The poor man!” exclaimed Maria again.

“His troubles now are his own,” said Christina. “The troubles we shared with him are ended.” She walked over to stand by Maria and watched Crawford’s black-clad figure striding away north toward Albert Road.

“Ended,” she repeated firmly.

THE COPPERY LEAVES of the elms within the walls of Highgate Cemetery hung motionless in the still autumn air, but the yellow grass in the shadow of one north-facing gravestone was shifting. The grass blades, which had been flattened by rain earlier in the day, now stood up like a porcupine’s quills, and quivered.

Several minutes later a white point poked up from a hole in the middle of the patch of upright grass blades and rose to a height of a foot before expanding out in a makeshift parasol of muddy white silk. The shaft of the parasol was a long splinter of oak, polished on one side, and the bottom end of it was gripped by a tiny gray hand.

With a series of peristaltic ripplings, a wrinkled gray newt-like figure ejected itself up and out onto the wet grass, and it huddled under the canopy of dirty silk as its snake-like lower half separated into two legs.

In the long fingers of its free hand it carried a tiny fragment of broken mirror.

Its ribs flexed in and out for several minutes under its gray skin while its tiny black eyes swiveled around, scanning the clearing under the elms. Then it got its legs under itself and stood up; and the parasol wobbled over it as it took high steps to a rose bush a few yards away.

In a hollow under the rose bush, hidden from the view of any person more than three feet tall, was a substantial pile of tiny mirror pieces, and the gray creature laid this last one down and then hunched away to the roots of the nearest tree, and its spidery fingers began scrabbling in the damp dirt for beetles; when it found one, it stuffed the wiggling thing into its mouth and began chewing eagerly and immediately commenced digging for another.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI WAS STARING absently at one of the ukiyo-e prints that William had hung on the grasscloth-lined walls of the drawing room. The wood-block print, rendered in several colors by incomprehensibly patient Japanese artisans, was a view of a mountain that seemed to be floating in the white sky, and Christina was frowning, for there was something ominous in the idea of a mountain freed from the surface of the earth.

She looked away from it finally and laid down her pen in order to refill her glass from the sherry decanter. Her new physician, Doctor Jenner, had advised her to sleep late, eat plenty of carrageen seaweed jelly, and drink what seemed to Christina to be extravagant amounts of sherry.

Her ailment or ailments were obscure, their only symptoms being a constant cough and listlessness. Certainly this malaise was preferable to the anemia and angina pectoris and nightmares from which she had suffered prior to Lizzie’s funeral seven years ago. Sometimes Christina suspected that her present lack of energy and alertness, and Gabriel’s failing eyesight and insomnia, were consequences of being deprived of some supernatural sustenance their uncle had been providing … before they choked him with the mirrors at the funeral.

She sighed and got slowly to her feet, taking the glass with her to the French doors; they opened onto the first-floor balcony, and she blinked through the panes at the Ionic columns of St. Pancras Church across Upper Woburn Place, and at the red-and-gold trees in Euston Square off to the left. Evening had fallen, and only the topmost spires and chimney pots were still touched with a rosy glow.

Her brother Gabriel had found a house to rent in Cheyne Walk down in Chelsea, but two years ago the rest of the family had moved from Albany Street a few streets west of here to this house on Euston Square.

She opened the window door and stepped out onto the roofed balcony. The breeze was chilly through her flannel nightgown, and smelled of smoke from a hundred chimneys.

Of course they were still living on William’s salary from the Inland Revenue office, which only this year had risen to eight hundred pounds. Three years ago the banking and broking firm Overend Gurney had failed, and in the ensuing financial crisis and recession, many other firms had collapsed too — there had been panic and even bread riots — but William’s government position had insulated the Rossettis from anxiety.

None of the other siblings could help appreciably. Gabriel squandered his money. Maria was teaching Italian and had written a textbook, and Christina earned royalties on the British and American editions of Goblin Market, but together the sisters added less than two hundred pounds to the household income in a year. And Maria was forty-two and Christina was nearly thirty-nine now, and neither was likely to marry.

The leaves on the curbside chestnut trees were still green, and between the boughs she saw shiny carriages and hansom cabs whirring along Upper Woburn Place. Their neighbors here were respectable stockbrokers and lawyers, but Christina missed the old house on Albany Street, where most of the family had lived for thirteen years.

She had written poetry there, for a time.

She shook her head impatiently and took a sip of the sherry. What was she thinking — she still wrote poetry!

— At a more labored pace, and without the psychic spark she had felt while writing verses before 1862.

Some of the poems that she had written since then had been published by Macmillan three years ago, in a volume titled The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems … and the Saturday Review had noted “a good many tame and rather slovenly verses” and “a dull, pointless cadence” in it. In the Athenaeum, a reviewer had said, “We do not see the conflict of the heart, but the sequel of that conflict,” and had lamented that the tone of the poems was that of a dirge.

Christina drained the glass of sweet wine and clanked it down on the rail so hard that the stem snapped off.

My life has a dull, pointless cadence, she thought furiously; I am in the sequel of that conflict, and a dirge is the appropriate tone!