“Moving?”
“Along the wall.”
Swinburne shrugged. “Staying out of the sunlight. What is this family—”
“Step back into it.” The old man on the far side of the dome was clearly staring at him now. “Yes, you’ve seen me. Now humor me — step back into the sunbeam — or I’ll drag you outside without a hat.”
Swinburne was sweating, and he glanced sideways at the sunlit patch of wall.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’d truly rather not.”
“Bloody hell. Does it hurt, sting?”
Swinburne shrugged, then reluctantly nodded.
“And have you lately begun to … write poetry?”
“I’ve always written poetry, I—”
A hundred feet away across the dome, the old man waved impatiently. “Damn you,” came the whisper along the wall, “has it suddenly become very good? Better than you had imagined you could write?”
Swinburne’s mouth fell open. “Yes,” was all he could say.
“Step into the light. It won’t hurt your sorry hide today, trust me.”
This stranger knew so much about him that Swinburne, dazed, did as he was told: he shuffled sideways into the shaft of sunlight — and it was simply warm, not astringent.
“Well, through glass,” he muttered, mistrustful of the apparent relief, “and holy glass, at that—”
“Try it again when you’re outside. She bit you, didn’t she? Before she died?”
Swinburne rocked his head against the stone wall, feeling the mild sun on his face. “Yes.”
For a few moments there was no skating whisper along the wall, and the only sounds were the windy echoes of random footsteps and coughs from the nave below.
At last the stranger’s soft voice came again. “I had hoped your dilemma was simpler. It’s her poisonous attention on you, in you, that reacted to sunlight … but her attention right now is many times decimated and concentrated only on her wounded self. You have at least one more day, I think, before she’ll be expanded enough to have regard for you again. You must leave England within twenty-four hours. She won’t sense you on the other side of the Channel, the wide, cold salt water.”
Swinburne was looking at his own right hand in the sunlight, savoring the simple warmth of it, and for a moment he let himself imagine starting over again, in France, say, with no history, free of—
“Would I still be able to write poetry?” he asked suddenly.
“Not like you’ve been writing recently, no. Not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you’re now free to shed. But — like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably.”
Swinburne relaxed and smiled, very relieved that this decision had turned out to be so easy; and he stepped back out of the sunlight, toward the doorway to the stairs. The old man on the other side of the round gallery looked fit enough, but if he chose to give chase it was unlikely that he’d be able to catch him.
Swinburne went down the curling stairway like a dancer spinning and tapping through a very fast allegro sequence.
I will never, he thought, go near the English Channel again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
You will not be cold there;
You will not wish to see your face in a mirror;
There will be no heaviness,
Since you will not be able to lift a finger.
There will be company, but they will not heed you;
Yours will be a journey of only two paces
Into view of the stars again; but you will not make it.
FOR SIX DAYS Lizzie’s body had lain in an open coffin in the upstairs parlor at 14 Chatham Place, and though Gabriel had spent nearly every waking hour in the room with her, watching her face by candlelight because the curtains were drawn across the river-facing windows, he had been sleeping on a cot in William’s room at the Albany Street house.
Now the downstairs front door at Chatham Place was open, and the black-draped laurel wreath that had hung there for six days was taken down so that the pallbearers wouldn’t snag against it when it came time to carry the coffin out. The hearse had not arrived yet, but over the course of the last couple of hours a dozen black-clad friends and family members had solemnly stepped inside and climbed the stairs to the now-crowded sitting room. The flaring gas jets were supplemented with candles on the mantel and on two high, cleared bookshelves.
The coffin rested on a long table against the curtained windows. On a credenza against the door-side wall were several platters of sliced ham and pickles and a huge glass bowl of rum punch, and the crowd of guests was kept moving by people sidling up to the credenza to refill plates and cups. Many of the mourners took the little funeral cakes, disks of sponge cake wrapped in white paper and sealed in black wax with a skull imprint, but these they mostly pocketed as remembrances.
Christina, wearing one of the black bombazine dresses she’d worn for a year after her father’s death, was sitting beside Maria on the sofa that faced the coffin and the curtained windows, and both of them were watching Gabriel warily. He was standing behind the coffin; Swinburne stood beside him, nervously fingering his gingery mustache, but Gabriel only stared down at Lizzie’s smooth white face.
He had been incredulous a week ago when his sisters had told him where Christina believed the diabolical little statue was located, and then for several hours he had adamantly opposed the plan Maria had devised from new study in the Reading Room at the British Museum — but he had finally relented, and he had even helped his sisters cut out the mattress and lining of the coffin in order to attach to the wooden floor the hammock-like array of etched and stained downward-facing mirrors.
Christina was relieved now to see that the white cambric mattress and silk linings showed no signs of their tampering, at least with Lizzie’s pale and oddly undeteriorated body now occupying the coffin. The veil Maria had constructed lay beside Lizzie’s head, with a few locks of her red hair draped over it to keep any mourners from getting too close a look at it.
“WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT calls ‘unclean spirits,’” Maria had explained to Gabriel and Christina six nights ago, “the old Jewish mystics called dybbuks, though originally the word was more a verb than a noun. The identity of one of these spirits is not confined to its body but is a standing spherical pattern of radiation, like Faraday’s description of electric fields.”
Christina had needed to have that explained to her, though Gabriel had claimed to know all about it.
Maria had gone on, “It’s a pattern that fills space, and matter is only a — like a cloud, to it. A mirror can cripple one of these spirits by reflecting part of its wave-form back on itself, so that the waves interfere with each other — they break the coherent patterns of its identity, causing arbitrary patches of awareness and oblivion, clear sight and blindness, presence and absence.”
“But,” Gabriel had objected, “if matter is just a cloud to them, why should a mirror be distinct?”
“It’s distinct if their attention is called to fix on it,” Maria had told him. “If one of these spirits incorporates a mirror into its particular attention, the reflection occurs. To be sure Uncle John fixes on the mirrors we use, they must be etched, and the incised grooves filled with blood that he recognizes and — and desires — and that he therefore will focus on.”