“I should go first!” exclaimed Crawford, but already McKee’s shoulders had disappeared inside the tomb; and the toes of her boots were tearing at the grass to push her farther in; and he bared his teeth and snapped his fingers impatiently until her boots disappeared into the narrow square of darkness.
And then he had tossed his hat and coat aside and was crouching to lie flat on the grass himself, and sliding his hands forward into the hole.
As the top of his head scraped under the low second-row square, he tried to spread his arms. To his left there was some empty space, and he could feel the block they had pushed inward, but to his right and above him the passageway was no wider than the hole he’d crawled in through; and when he had slithered in a yard farther, his groping hands discovered that the open space on the left closed up too. He was glad that he had left his coat behind; even so, his shirt was scraping the stone walls on both sides, and he had to keep his right shoulder lifted a bit so that his rib cage was diagonal in the square tunnel, since there was no room for him to lie flat. Very quickly he had left behind the gray daylight.
He could hear McKee pushing herself along ahead of him, and from beyond her puffed a cold, clay-scented draft.
He could feel that his feet were inside now. The surface under him felt like dirt-gritty stone, and then it was just flat stone, textured with what felt like chisel grooves.
Crawford was panting, and the noise of it was batted back at him by the very close stone surfaces, and it occurred to him that he could not touch his face: even if he raised his arm to the top of the square tunnel and ground his elbow into the corner, there wasn’t room for him to swing his forearm backward.
Instantly the breath stopped in his throat and his palms slapped the floor and began pushing him backward while he tried to tug himself along with the skidding toes of his boots. His shirt was snagging against the walls and bunching up around his neck.
Then he was breathing again, in rapid gasps, but over the noise of that and his thunderous heartbeat he heard McKee call softly from the darkness ahead, “Crawford, what is it?”
And he could hear in her voice the tightness of nearly unbearable strain, of savage panic savagely suppressed.
Clearly she was experiencing everything that he was, and she was not clawing her way back out. She was ahead of him in this tunnel, and that was horrible, but all he could do about it was to be there too, with her.
He forced himself to exhale all the air from his lungs; then he flexed his invisible fingers and inhaled. He realized that his crumpled shirt was sodden with sweat.
“Nothing,” he said. “I — thought I felt a spider.”
After a moment he heard her cough out two tense syllables of a laugh. And then she was moving again, and he resumed pulling himself along after her, suppressing all thoughts.
CHAPTER TWELVE
What be her cards, you ask? Even these —
The heart, that doth but crave
More, having fed; the diamond,
Skill’d to make base seem brave;
The club, for smiting in the dark;
The spade, to dig a grave.
A DOZEN OF THE mourners had come all the way to the grave in the familiar clearing among the elm trees, which Christina thought had grown taller since her father’s funeral here eight years ago. She took a step closer to the deep rectangular hole cut in the grassy sod and looked across it at the faces — there was Gabriel, his face a sagging blankness, and William, and Maria with a handkerchief to her eyes, and their mother and aunt, and twitchy Swinburne who had not removed his hat, and the priest — and that white-bearded man was Edward Trelawny! — and, hanging back with their caps in their hands, the four gravediggers — but where had Adelaide and Mr. Crawford got to?
She looked down into the hole, but she wasn’t standing close enough to see the top of her father’s coffin, if indeed it was now exposed; but perhaps the gravediggers had left a layer of soil to lie between her father’s coffin and this new one.
She had asked one of them about the condition of her father’s grave before they had dug the fresh hole, and she had been disturbed to hear the man’s offhand remark that there had been a mole hole in the grass over it, and that their shovels had ruptured segments of the hole all the way down.
But there was no way Christina could ask them to clear all the dirt away from her father’s coffin to see if there was a hole in it.
The pile of earth they had dug out — for the second time in eight years — was a mound under a green tarpaulin off to her left, though a token shovelful of dark loam had been left on the brown grass beside the grave.
The priest was shaking holy water onto Lizzie’s coffin now, the drops beading up on the varnished lid like raindrops, and he was reading something from the Bible in a frail voice that the breeze snatched away.
Lizzie’s coffin lay now on a black-velvet-draped bier on the grass to the right of the group of mourners. It would have cost Gabriel quite a bit — not just the two-inch-thick polished oak and the brass handles and plaque, but, as William had whispered to her, the sacrificial offering inside it of all of Gabriel’s poems!
Christina reflected with a shiver that she could never sacrifice her own poetry that way. It would be like burning an old lover’s letters — destroying something that was not entirely hers to dispose of.
The thought of her poetry brought on another dizzy, fiddling wave of her uncle’s attention, so strong that she almost expected to see him among the mourners, staring intently at her with the eyes of the portrait on the wall at home; but she knew he was down in that hole, inside her father’s coffin, in fact inside her father’s dead throat.
If only the damned priest could hurry, and at last … at last let the gravediggers fill in the hole, she thought quickly, steering her mind away from a thought she must not let her uncle perceive.
She frowned and shut her eyes and tried to pray, though she was even more afraid of God’s attention than of John Polidori’s.
EVENTUALLY, “A WELL,” CAME McKee’s voice from the darkness ahead. “I think.”
Crawford kept crawling forward until his fingertips brushed the soles of her boots in the pitch blackness.
“Don’t crowd me,” she said. “I can feel rungs down in it, like the one by St. Clement’s. Damn, I should have come in feet first.”
She was hesitating, and Crawford almost said, Let me go first, before he realized how useless that thought was; then she said softly, perhaps speaking to herself, “I think we’re closest to St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. ‘I do not know, says the great bell at Bow.’” Then, louder, she said, “Aedis te deum nosco.”
Her boots moved forward, out of reach, and he heard the fabric of her dress sliding against stone.
“What are you going to do?” Crawford asked hoarsely.
“I’m going to grab hold of one of the rungs below me, and then — do a somersault, I suppose, and try to hang on through it.”
Crawford tried to picture what she was describing, and he couldn’t see how she could maintain her grip through such a move.
“Are there,” he asked desperately, “rungs above you?”
“Good thought.”
He heard her dress rustling and tearing, and her shoes knocked and scuffed in front of his face. He reached out and lightly touched the soles of them, and he realized that she had managed to roll over onto her back in the tight tunnel.