The two of them weren’t much wetter than the few other pedestrians they passed, as first Crawford and then the woman crossed the muddy gravel lanes of the Strand, and the one cabbie that reined in his horse for a moment just shrugged and sped up again when Crawford waved him off. The unsynchronized crunch of the shared pair of pattens sounded like the footsteps of a drunk repeatedly attempting and then abandoning a difficult dance step.
When he had walked quickly down the narrow lane that was Wych Street to his own front door, he looked back as he dug the key from his pocket. The woman had stepped in under the overhanging upper floor of an old house a dozen yards behind him.
His hands were shaking but he was careful to twist the bolt back as quietly as possible, and then he paused to reach down and push the knotted strip of scarf forward off his boot; ordinarily he would have stepped straight into the parlor and yanked the bell-pull to summon Mrs. Middleditch from her little top-floor bedroom, but tonight he wanted to recover from whatever it was that he had just participated in, without extra witnesses.
He swung the door open, lifting its weight against the hinges, and stepped into the unlit entry hall. He waited until the woman had hurried in past him, then shut the door and rotated the bolt knob. The rattle of the rain on gravel was shut out, and the only sound was panting breath and the dripping of water on the waxed wooden floor.
The woman was carrying her shoes now, and laid them carefully on the hall table.
“This way,” he whispered, and stepped into the parlor.
The fire in the grate was just glowing coals, but he propped a couple of fresh logs in there and tucked some crumpled newspapers under them, and after he had fetched a decanter and two glasses, he and his unknown companion sat on the carpet in front of the reviving fire and took the first, restorative gulps of whisky. The warm liquor burned its way down his throat and began to loosen his tensed muscles.
The fire was flickering brightly now, and he pressed water from his hair and beard and then held his chilled palms out toward the heat. He exhaled, and for the first time looked squarely at his companion. She was younger than he had assumed, perhaps twenty. She had pushed her dark hair back from her forehead, and her face was pale and narrow.
The windows rattled, and the woman’s head whipped around — the noise wasn’t repeated, and after a few seconds, she slowly turned back toward the fire.
“Wind funnels down this street,” Crawford said. That was true, and probably it had been the wind. But he sighed and glanced at the clock on the mantel and saw that it was well after one in the morning. “I have a guest room, here, with a bath,” he said. “My housekeeper can show you where it is.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
“What,” he began at last, giving her time to stop him; but the wide dark eyes simply held his, so he went on: “was that?”
Her abrupt laugh was quiet but jarring. “The gentleman wants to know what it was,” she said. “This isn’t your first drink of the evening, is it? Let’s see, it appeared when you and I were close enough that we could have touched each other, and you knew to get us into the river, and — and your parlor reeks of garlic! What do you, now that you can ponder it, imagine that it was?”
Crawford drained his glass and refilled it. “The garlic,” he said weakly, “is a disinfectant. Prevents mortification. I’m a veterinary surgeon.”
“A veterinary surgeon.” She looked around at the tidy room by the flickering firelight: the framed prints, the old-fashioned vine-patterned wallpaper, the street-side curtains. “Smells like you treat a lot of mortified horses right in here.”
What he smelled was river water, and it occurred to him that his watch was probably ruined. “You can’t expect me to explain medical—”
“A waste of time, I’m sure. Let’s talk about what happened just now. The thing on the bridge, the river—”
“Listen.” He shifted around on the carpet to face her more squarely. “Two years ago,” he said. He noticed that he was still shaking, and he took another swallow of the whisky. “Two years ago I was drunk. Not like this—really drunk. And I thought I saw a — a ghost, and it attacked me. I — hid from it—” He gave a hitching gasp and realized to his embarrassment that he was on the verge of sobbing again, as he had been on the bridge before this woman had appeared. He shook his head and stared blindly into the fire.
After a moment she asked quietly, “Why were you so drunk, before you saw the ghost?”
“Why,” he countered dully, “should it make a difference that we were close together, on the bridge?”
“Close together and out in the open, under the nighttime sky. Oh—” She shrugged. “I think it’s like … two candle flames are more visible if they’re held together, overlapping. Those things ordinarily don’t see us very well, thank God.”
“What … are they? The g-ghost, two years ago, I used garlic and the river to hide from it.”
“Didn’t you have any garlic tonight?”
He shook his head and again touched his damp waistcoat pocket. “Evidently not. My housekeeper is punctual about renewing the disinfectant garlic wash on the windowsills, but — these days I’m sometimes careless about carrying it with me.”
“Disinfectant garlic wash,” she said, apparently savoring the jargon. “Well, I should have been carrying some myself. But you never invited one of those things in here, I hope?”
“No.” He yawned, more from tension than fatigue. “I would have, this ghost, before it attacked me — but I was outdoors, by the river. And in any case I’ve moved since.”
“Ah.” She reached out and took his hand. Her hand was warm from the fire, but he still didn’t look at her. “Why were you so drunk?”
He was increasingly uncomfortable, with this conversation and also with the fact that he was alone here at this hour with this woman. Really he should summon Mrs. Middleditch.
“Drunks have hallucinations,” he said, more to himself than to her. “It might have been a hallucination, the ghost; this thing tonight doesn’t prove…”
She was still holding his hand. He glanced at her, and she was staring at him, her eyebrows raised.
Crawford took a deep gulp of the whisky and sighed. “Oh hell. The reason I was drunk was because my wife, and my two sons, had died the night before. They said, witnesses said, that lightning struck the ferryboat they were on.” He freed his hand to refill his glass, and he gave her a haggard caricature of a smile. “What of yourself? Do you have a family?”
“My husband died — uh, six months ago. We didn’t have any children.” She stretched her arms over her head and then sat forward, staring into the fire. “But you carried garlic with you, after. And you knew to get us both into the river tonight. How is it that you know these things?”
“I hate all this filthy stuff,” he said absently; then he frowned into the fire. “My parents had a history with creatures like that thing on the bridge, and they managed to elude them. They told me how. They were old and eccentric, and I didn’t entirely believe them.”
She stared at him with no expression. “Who was the ghost? The one that you would have invited in, but it attacked you?”
“It was — it was probably a hallucination.”
She didn’t look away.
He pressed his palms flat into the carpet but still felt as if he were losing his balance at the top of a high precipice.
But it was easier to go on than to stop now. “The witnesses — one of them said that my eldest son, Girard, was helping some person or — helping some person, onto the ferry from a boat that had drawn up alongside, in the moments before … before the vessel was struck.”