ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL WAS a particularly daunting white splendor in the cold noonday sun. It stood blocking out most of the blue sky on a wide railed square at the crest of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City, and though he couldn’t see the dome from the foot of the broad marble stairs out front, the two widely separated towers and the two lofty rows of paired columns between them made Swinburne feel as insignificant as the limitless dark ocean had done last night. The bottom third of the enormous building, the hundred-foot extent from the projecting entablature between the two galleries of columns down to the pavement, seemed a slightly darker shade of white, as if the sea had once tried to engulf the cathedral and then impotently receded.
And I’m out of my depth, he thought as he began reluctantly tapping up the steps. He was wearing a hat and gloves, not because of the cold but because direct sunlight had begun lately to irritate his skin — at least this distasteful place offered welcome shade.
It was of course a church, a Christian church, and mentally he recited lines from a poem he’d written: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Certainly Swinburne didn’t seem to be conquering by pursuing the pagan sorts of supernaturalism. They were real enough — as proved by the two ghosts he had spoken to out at sea last night! — but the world had indeed grown gray, grayer than he had guessed when he had written the poem; and he was afraid that he would never be able to drink of Lethe’s river: to forget his love for Lizzie … and her refusal of him.
The broad interior of the cathedral, with its columns and the arches of its ceiling peaking impossibly far overhead, made him feel like a rodent; no service was going on at the moment, fortunately, and the isolated figures praying in the pews were all facing away from him. Who, he wondered as he scuttled through slanting beams of rainbow-colored light from the south-facing stained-glass windows, is this man who wants to talk to me? And why does he?
Far overhead, the interior of the great dome ballooned up in what must have been eight huge triangular concave panels with vague dark murals painted on them, but Swinburne slanted off to the right across the marble floor, to the stairs, before he would have to walk under its ornate high immensity; and the tall white-and-gold altar was thankfully still farther away down the long central aisle.
The corkscrew staircase was comfortably narrow and dim; it was warmer than the vast nave had been and smelled reassuringly of tallow and old book paper. He took off his hat to keep from bumping it against the low ceiling. After about a hundred ascending steps, he reached a gallery with a library at one end of it, but the Whispering Gallery proved to be higher up, so he returned to the stairs and kept climbing.
After puffing his way up an even greater number of stone stairs than before, he stepped out into the highest gallery inside the cathedral, a circular catwalk high above the nave, at the very base of the incurving dome.
A ring of tall windows in the dome above him let in bright daylight, and above them were the huge murals he had glimpsed the bottoms of from the nave floor below. He stepped out to the railing and looked down — a hundred feet directly below, the white-and-black checkerboard pattern of the floor was interrupted by a wide compass-rose mosaic.
The enormous Gothic geometry of it all, the slanting insubstantial buttresses of sunlight, and the sheer volume of empty space above and below him, were dizzying, and it was several moments before he remembered that he was supposed to meet someone right here — at the south rim of the dome, by the stairs.
He pulled out his watch and squinted at it: noon exactly. Three or four other people stood at other points around the gallery’s circumference, peering up at the murals, but none of them was paying any evident attention to him.
The view below chilled his belly, and he stepped back to lean against the rounded wall below the windows.
And at his ear came a whisper: “Poet”—he glanced around quickly, but no one was within a dozen yards of him—“stay where you are.”
Of course, he thought nervously, the Whispering Gallery! The interior of the dome must carry sounds right around the whole stone ring.
“What?” he said softly.
“Speak against the stone,” came the disembodied whisper again.
Swinburne obediently pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall.
“What do you have to tell me?” he muttered.
“You’re in love with a ghost.” The disembodied sentence seemed to carry an implicit you fool at the end of it. “You shouldn’t need me to tell you this, and if you’ve got a brain in your head you understood it last night, but — have no further contact with the thing. I’d say ‘with her,’ but — as you probably noticed — it’s not really a ‘her’ anymore. Go meet a real flesh-and-blood girl, and fall in love with her.”
Swinburne was frowning. Could this man somehow represent the Church, or the government? Was there some old law about necromancy still on the books? He peered at the other people standing at intervals around the gallery, trying to guess which of them might be the one speaking to him. “You—” he began. “This is absurd. A ghost? You’re obviously drunk—”
“One of us probably is,” came the whisper, “but it’s not me. Chichuwee told me all about your conversation with him, and I know a couple of things that the bird man doesn’t.”
Swinburne could feel his face blushing against the cold stone, and he blinked out across the dome — a beam of sunlight from one of the windows had moved onto him, and he shuffled sideways to be out of the sun’s glare. There was a tall, white-bearded old man standing on the opposite side of the railed ring, a hundred feet away across the empty air of the dome — surely that was the furtive speaker. “This is none of your—”
“It is of mine, boy,” came the eerily far-traveling whisper, and the tall old man at the northernmost point of the gallery hunched his shoulders as the voice reached Swinburne’s ears. “If it weren’t for a sin of mine, the embodiment of which was broken but now grows again behind my jugular vein — if not for that — you could go sailing out to talk to your dead girl every night; but you’re not the only one who loves her now, and your rival is inclined toward tumultuous jealousy and will surely kill you.”
“Rival? Who, Gabriel? He doesn’t—”
“No,” and this time it was spoken: “you fool. I don’t know who Gabriel is, nor who you are, and it doesn’t matter. I only know the rival. Hah! Ask Chichuwee about the Nephilim, though I expect the answer will cost you many more birds than your previous consultation did. There’s a creature, call it a goddess, an archaic goddess, who loves your ghost-girl, and who will kill any mortals who love her too, or who she loved, back when she still could. Fortunately for you, this — this goddess is wounded and blinded right now, for another day or so, and is not aware of your ill-advised expedition last night. Don’t repeat it.”
Swinburne shuffled sideways again to stay out of the sunbeam. He was trying to be amused by this grotesque conversation. “Her husband, Gabriel—he loved her, and she loved him. Is this goddess of yours going to kill him?”
“Unless he has joined a god’s family too. And I don’t need yet another member of that sort of family to deal with, so heed me. This — why are you moving?”