Christina was looking at her sister, and now reached out to touch her lips to stop her talking. “In the grass it is,” she said, and she turned away from the hill to hike herself up onto the wall, then swung her legs around and hopped down into the calf-high grass. “Thank you for doing this,” she said over her shoulder, trying to sound more resolute than she felt. “For saving me.”
“If I’m not damning us both.”
Maria clambered over the wall herself and immediately crouched to begin pulling up clumps of long grass and then scooping out the warm black loam underneath. “You watch him!” she said in a shrill whisper. “If he comes this way, run for the chapel!” She glanced up at her sister, and then hissed, “Jesus save us, are you smiling at him?”
“I’m the last sight he’ll see, God willing.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Kneel down here — and let down your hair. We’re supposed to be mourning.”
“I think,” said Christina, reaching behind her head as she knelt in the grass, “I am.”
Maria pulled clips from her own black hair and shook it out. Both girls were shivering. “I can mourn for our uncle,” Maria said, “dead these twenty-four years.”
Christina kissed the stone before laying it into the shallow hole Maria had dug. Maria frowned but didn’t say anything and began piling the damp earth onto it.
“More,” she said. “We want a mound.”
Christina pulled up some more sheaves of grass and gouged up handfuls of dirt from underneath and added them to the pile.
From her pocket Maria pulled three black ribbons, and after a moment’s hesitation she laid them crossed in a star pattern over the little mound.
Then she shook the jar she’d brought from the house—“It’s supposed to be foaming,” she said — and poured milk over the mound. In the gathering darkness the milk hardly showed on the black mound, and in a moment it had disappeared.
“Now the blood,” she said.
Christina reached behind her and lifted the chalice from the wall top and handed it to Maria.
“Rest in peace, Uncle John,” said Maria softly as she poured the wine over the dirt. “Please.”
Christina nodded and managed to say, “Go.”
She glanced up quickly, and Maria flinched back with a gasp, for a deeper shadow had seemed to fall across them from only a yard away — and then it was gone, and the grass was rippling in waves away from the raw mound.
Christina was reminded of having once at twilight walked through a field of tall grass and disturbed sleeping birds, who darted short distances away without appearing above the grass tops, so that her passage had seemed to cause ripples, as if she were wading through a pond instead of grass.
She thought she caught a whiff of the sea, or gunpowder, and the metallic smell of blood.
She rubbed her hand over her face, and there was no more sensation of clinging spiderwebs. “He’s gone,” she whispered, feeling empty.
“Thank God.” Maria got laboriously to her feet, brushing off the front of her riding habit. “We must return the chalice.”
“Tomorrow I’ll dig the statue up again,” said Christina. “Papa will be relieved to have it back, even inert.”
Maria started to speak, then just shook her head.
The two girls led the horses back across the road, and within minutes they were mounted and trotting away through the deepening gloom toward the lights of the Read house.
THE WIND FROM THE north swept the grass in even waves across the slope in the darkness, but in the patch of grass by the wall, the waves converged in on the mounded pile of fresh-turned dirt and combed the grass into a spiral, and then the grass blades and the mound flattened, as if under a weight.
By morning the grass had straightened up again, as if the weight had joined the milk and wine in soaking into the ground, or as if it had risen and moved away.
BOOK I
Hope to Die
February 1862
CHAPTER ONE
I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure…
WYCH STREET WAS two rows of tall old houses facing each other across a narrow pavement now dusted with snow, just north of the broad lanes of the Strand and only a few streets from the line of arches along the land-facing side of Somerset House. The cold morning sun silhouetted the steeple of St. Clement Danes to the east and lanced down the street — here glaring from the panes of a bay window on an upper floor, there glittering in the frost crystals on a drainpipe slanting across a still-shadowed wall — and a woman in a blue coat was walking slowly down the middle of the pavement with the sun at her back.
Her hands were hidden in an oversized white ermine muff, and her breath was puffs of steam whisked away on the breeze as she peered at the variously shaped dark doorways she passed on either side. Finally she halted, and for nearly a minute just stared at a brass plaque beside the door of an otherwise unremarkable house:
The plaque read: JOHN CRAWFORD, M.R.C.V.S. SURGERY FROM 9 TO 11 O’CLOCK.
The knocker was a wrought-iron cat’s head, hinged at the top.
A bigger plume of steam blew away from under her bonnet, and then she stepped to the door and carefully freed one gloved hand to give the knocker two sharp clanks.
“In sunshine or in sha-adow,” she sang softly to herself; then she smiled and touched the ermine muff. “And kneel and say an ave there for me.”
She heard steps from inside, and a curtain twitched in the frosted window at her left, and then a bolt rattled and the door swung inward.
The man who had opened the door blinked out at her without recognition. “Is it an emergency?” he asked. “The surgery isn’t open for hours yet.”
He wore a brown sack-coat with an outmoded plaid shawl over his shoulders, and she noted that his beard was still dark brown.
“Come in,” he added, stepping aside.
She walked past him into the hallway’s warm smells of bacon and garlic and tobacco as he closed the door behind her and asked, “Can I take your coat?”
She laid the muff on a table and pulled off her muddy boots and her gloves; then she shrugged out of her blue velveteen coat, and as she handed it to him, the muff on the table squeaked and chirped.
He paused, looking from it to her, and raised his eyebrows.
“Er … do you,” she asked with a tight smile, “minister to birds?”
“I really only ever go as small as chickens, and that sounded like a songbird. My main customers are cab horses, and I do pro bono publico work for stray cats.” He smiled. “But I suppose I can advise, if you’ll bring the patient in.” He waved toward an open doorway, and the woman retrieved the muff and stepped through into a parlor with framed hunting prints on the green-papered walls. The ivory-colored curtains over the front windows had probably been white originally.
A cold fireplace gaped below a marble mantelpiece that was still hung with tinsel and wilted holly. A dozen wooden chairs were ranked closely along two of the walls, and a long couch hid the sills of the street-side windows. Half a dozen cats were sprawled on the couch and the low table.
“Do sit,” said Crawford. “I’ll fetch in some tea.”
He disappeared through an inner door, and the woman pushed several of the cats off the couch onto the carpet — one had only three legs, and another appeared to have no eyes, though they all scampered away energetically — and sat down on the cleared cushion. She carefully slid a small cylindrical birdcage no bigger than a pint-pot out of the ermine muff and set it upright on the table. The tiny brown bird within peered around the room, paying no evident attention to the retreating cats.