Feeling dizzy at doing it, Christina answered him honestly. “My father — he—”
“I’m sorry to hear about it, miss.” He stepped past her, his boots crunching in wet gravel, and beckoned her to follow. “When did he pass on?”
Christina fell into step beside him as they plodded away from the lantern light.
“Eight years ago.”
Hake stopped. “Did you say eight years? I’m sorry, but it’s not likely that he’d be still—”
“He contacted me, tonight. He asked me to meet him by the river.”
Hake shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll stop here, miss, and let you go farther. Not more than twenty paces past the stairs, mind, or you’ll be in grievous mud.”
“In grievous mud,” echoed Christina, stepping forward away from him across the wet sand and gravel, into the dark mist. The light from the lanterns behind her glittered faintly on the tops of the closest sand ripples, and she tried to step on those.
When her eyes adjusted to the faint gray luminescence of the fog, she became aware of several sets of abandoned-looking stairs fretting the patchwork stone wall to her right, and the river on her left was nothing but remote bells and vague splashing sounds at indeterminate distances; she believed she was somewhere between the Scotland Yard coal wharf and the Adelphi terrace houses, but the real world seemed to lie very far away behind her.
Never mind ghosts, she thought — there are probably thieves and footpads along this Godforsaken strip of the bottom of nowhere. I should go back to Hake and his companions, back to the sleepy cabbie, back to poor William with his wretched poetry in the warm parlor at home.
Damn you, Papa, for — but she cut the thought short.
And then she heard a whisper to her left: “Christina!”
She halted, and then gingerly stepped out into the river shallows, hoping her boots were waterproof. “Papa?”
Through the blurring mist she could see that there was something like a small dolphin or huge catfish lying in the shallows, panting visibly. Tentacles growing out of its face curled and splashed.
She heard water trickling, and then saw that the thing had a bony hinged arm too, with wet fingers on the end of it.
“Take my hand,” it wheezed.
Christina forced herself not to step back; but in a tight voice she said, “No.”
“My fault,” whispered the creature that was her father’s ghost. The arm fell back into the water with a splash. “Gabriel’s daughter — your lives — your soul. Looking at me? Don’t look. I stay on the bottom most days — all fear one another — river worms now.”
“William,” she said helplessly, “said to tell you he loves you.”
The creature groaned softly.
It occurred to Christina that she would be able to bear this for only a few more seconds.
“What did you want to tell me?” Her mouth was full of saliva, and she swallowed and gagged. “You asked me to meet you here.”
“Cut yourself?” said the fish-thing on a rising, whistling note. “On a rock? You could. Give your poor father a few drops of your living blood?”
This time she did step back. “No. Was that all you wanted to say to me?”
“No, no, I’m sorry, forgive me: don’t look at me. No, I wanted to say — choke it. It choked me.”
Icy water abruptly invaded the toe of Christina’s left boot, and her whole body shuddered at the shock. She gasped, “Choke what, Papa?”
“Statue, the uncle, of yours, my Francesca’s brother! Moony knows how. Save your souls; undo it all, then I can save mine.”
The freezing water quickly spread under the sole of her foot; her toes were already numb. “Papa, where is it?”
The fish-thing blew out spray, though its breath didn’t steam. “Here,” it rasped, “damn you, here! No, not here — in my throat. My heart clenched, I was dying — I thought Polidori would save me, immortal — I meant to swallow it — but — just gasping, choking.”
For the moment she forgot about her foot and her lonely and gloomy surroundings. “You choked on it?”
“Choke him. Moony knows how.” The thing thrashed clumsily, rolling out toward deeper water. Its wide ragged mouth was toward the foggy sky, and it wheezed, “Ugly, crushed, blind — I know — sorry — this waits for you all too, remember.”
Then it seemed to suffer some sort of fit, and went spasming and splashing out of sight into the fog; and it must have sunk, for the scratching breath and the splashing ceased.
“Papa…!” whispered Christina, all alone in the cold on the narrow dark shore.
Then she reminded herself that she was thirty-one now, not fourteen anymore; and she was likely to catch pneumonia if she didn’t get into dry slippers soon.
Tears were cold on her cheeks. She turned and began plodding back toward the lights of the watermen.
IT WAS ELEVEN THIRTY when Gabriel unlocked the street door at 14 Chatham Place and began groping and clumping his way up the unlit stairs. He heard furtive rustling and whispering from the floor above, and hoped Lizzie wasn’t in communication with dead Walter Deverell again; Gabriel had taken away her pencil planchette, but she could have improvised one with a bent fork or something.
The sitting room above him was unlit, but he could see faint changes in the dimness up there, as if figures were quickly but silently darting about.
“Who’s there?” he whispered, not wanting to wake Lizzie if it was someone else. Could Swinburne have come back here?
A draft of chilly air swept down the stairs, and Gabriel’s nostrils twitched at the scent of the sea. Christ, she had opened the French doors over the river!
Gabriel took the last steps two at a time, but the sitting room was empty when he stood panting in the dark doorway. Reflections and echoes from the river, he told himself, not intruders. He stepped to the French doors, but before pulling them closed, he looked out at the infinity of fog. A bell sounded out there somewhere, and then after a few seconds another; who would be out on the river tonight? He thought of going out onto the balcony and peering down at the dark shore below — but the sudden, irrational thought that he might see his dead father down there on the sand, blindly gaping upward, made him close the doors with enough force to rattle the glass panes.
He was sweating — because he was still wearing his overcoat. He wrestled it off and threw it, along with his scarf and gloves, onto the couch. And finally he walked across to the hall and the bedroom door.
The door was ajar, and Lizzie was asleep on the bed, lying on top of the blankets and still in the dress she’d worn at dinner. She was snoring deeply.
Gabriel sighed in qualified relief and decided to pour himself a brandy before going to bed.
Then he noticed the piece of paper on the front of her dress. Stepping closer, he saw that it was folded and pinned to the fabric.
Not letting himself think or breathe, he crossed to the bed and tore the note free and opened it.
He read: This is the only way out that will save us. Preserve my family by avoiding them, especially poor Harry.
The laudanum bottle was on the bedside table, empty now. She had always been protective of her family, especially her half-wit brother Harry.
“Lizzie!” He took hold of her bare shoulders and shook her, but her head just rolled limply. “Lizzie!” he shouted into her face.
She showed no response. He noticed that she was paler than usual, and with a trembling hand he took hold of her wrist. Her pulse, when he found it, was slow and weak.
Take the lot, he had told her when he had thrust the laudanum bottle into her hand. His chest was suddenly empty and cold.