Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“Certainly,” she said, picking it up. She seemed brightly interested in the whole procedure.

More to reassure Christina than from consideration of the man’s health, Crawford lifted the glass chimney from one of the lamps and held the fleam blade in the flame until it was black; then he replaced the chimney and waved the blade in the air for a few moments to cool it off.

“Er… Adelaide,” he said, “would you hold his elbow out?”

McKee gripped Beetroot’s arm with both hands, presenting the inside of the elbow. The man was grinning, apparently at the unprecedented elaborateness of it all.

Crawford held the blade up, squinting at it. “You might not want to watch, Miss Christina.”

“Squeamishness,” she said, “is one thing I don’t suffer from.”

“Is there any liquor?” Crawford asked. “To clean the skin,” he added when Beetroot gave him an impatient look.

“Oh. Bottle of gin under the table.” The man laughed. “Clean the skin, is it!”

“Johanna, if you would. A splash on his elbow right over the vein, and then scrub it a bit with your handkerchief. And then hold the bowl under.”

The girl did as he said, afterward absently tipping the bottle up for a mouthful before setting it on the table. The sharp juniper smell filled the cellar, and the straw figures hanging from the ceiling seemed to dance more vigorously in the still air.

Crawford tried to ignore the crude dolls. He laid the pointed tip of the fleam against the scarring over the man’s median orbital vein, and then tapped the handle with the bloodstick — being careful to do it very lightly, for he was used to doing this on the neck of a horse, with a coat of coarse hair to get through.

Immediately a line of dark blood ran down and began puddling in the silver bowl Johanna held.

“Andrew!” called Beetroot. “Come watch as he does it to this woman. This is how you do it, not like you’re driving a nail!” After several seconds, he unfastened a pin one-handed from his shirt and deftly poked it through the cut in his pale skin, and then folded his arm. “That’s plenty.”

Crawford took the bowl from Johanna and tilted it toward the lamplight — the blood in it was staying dark, not reddening in the air.

The man laughed, straightening his arm now and looping a length of thread around the pin in his elbow. “Trust a medical man to notice that! Always happens, with people born under the Thames — we’re partly dead, drowned, always.” He looked past Crawford at Christina. “And now the wine.”

Christina stepped forward across the mushy boards but just gave Crawford a stare and didn’t roll back her sleeve yet.

He nodded and wiped the fleam blade, then again lifted the lamp chimney and carefully turned the blade in the flame.

“Johanna,” he said, “gin again, but just for the elbow this time, eh?”

Christina rolled up her sleeve and handed Johanna a fresh handkerchief, and Johanna poured gin on it and then swabbed Christina’s elbow.

Crawford was aware of young Andrew standing beside him as he gently tapped the fleam against the soft skin of Christina’s inner elbow, and he was glad to see that she didn’t even wince as the blood flowed around her arm and dripped rapidly into the bowl Johanna was holding.

From the corner of his eye, Crawford saw that the straw dolls were hanging motionless now. “You’ve got the attention of all the children,” said Beetroot, nodding.

When Crawford judged that several tablespoonfuls had run into the bowl, he reached for the handkerchief Johanna was holding, but the man caught Crawford’s wrist.

“Not yet.”

Christina just closed her eyes as more of her blood sluiced around her elbow and fell into the bowl.

After another thirty seconds, Crawford took the handkerchief from Johanna, and the man nodded reluctantly.

“I suppose that’ll do.” He pointed to another pin in his shirt, raising his eyebrows, but Christina shook her head and just wrapped the gin-soaked handkerchief around her elbow and then folded her arm to hold it tightly.

“Smooth work,” she said to Crawford.

Beetroot took the bowl from Johanna. “Laces, now, laces!” he exclaimed, snatching up several lengths of string from the table and stirring them with his fingers into the mixed blood.

“Shoes, Andrew, shoes!”

The boy sprang to the shelves and tucked several pairs of shoes under his arm, then crouched beside Johanna and held them up one by one beside her right foot.

“These,” he said, straightening up with a battered pair of high-topped black shoes.

Beetroot dredged one string out of the blood and handed the dripping thing to the boy. “You’ve got the left shoe, you’re clockwise,” he said.

And then the two of them were threading the strings through the lace-grommets of the shoes in a peculiar spiral pattern rather than the ordinary crisscross progression. Crawford saw that the man was stringing the right shoe counterclockwise. The dolls jiggled excitedly overhead.

At last Beetroot and Andrew tied careful knots in the middles of the spiral patterns.

“Here,” Beetroot said, thrusting toward Johanna the shoe he had prepared as Andrew handed her the other. “These’ll be a bit loose, since you’re not to untie them, ever. Stuff ’em with rags to make ’em fit. Shoes!” he yelled to Andrew, fumbling in the blood for more strings. “You people can go,” he said, his attention now on the next pair of shoes, and the two pairs after that.

“Put them on now,” McKee told Johanna. “While we’re still underground and it’s still raining.”

Beetroot looked up from stringing a fresh shoe and nodded.

Johanna’s nostrils flared in distaste as she looked at the ugly old shoes and the bloody laces in them, but she handed them to McKee and then braced one hand against the wall to take off her boots.

Crawford picked up his muddy coat and dug out his handkerchief, and he gave it to Johanna to stuff into one of the shoes; then, after glancing around, he unbuttoned the collar from his shirt and handed it to her for the other one.

“Thanks,” said Johanna as she fitted her stocking feet into the hiding shoes. She glanced around at her companions. “We all looked better at the wedding an hour ago, didn’t we?”

“It’s been a disheveling day,” Crawford agreed, thrusting his arms through the sleeves of his soggy coat.

Johanna waved back at the room, though the jiggling of the hanging dolls seemed to be the only response.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Crawford, taking her arm and turning her toward the ladder.

He went first up the old wooden rungs, but the few people on the street, huddled in doorways against the rain, only glanced at him incuriously. He waved the rest of his party up, and in a few minutes McKee had led them to the more populated expanse of Earl Street, where she turned left, back toward Seven Dials.

Johanna was limping, but when Crawford gave her a concerned look, she told him, “I’ve worn worse, I’ll get used to them.” Then she grimaced up from under the umbrella. “But do I sleep in them?”

“I — don’t know,” he said.

Johanna shrugged and kept walking. “That boy Andrew didn’t look well, did he?” she said after a few more paces. “I bet soon there’ll be another straw doll.”

Hurrying along beside them, Christina whispered something that might have been a phrase from a prayer.

The rain trailed to a stop just as they emerged into the irregular square at the junction of the seven streets, and a stray beam of sunlight flickered across the circle in the center, momentarily visible between wheels and horses’ legs.

Christina had rolled her wet sleeve down again, and a stain of blood showed at her elbow, but she didn’t seem to have any trouble walking, and they would be able to flag a cab here.