Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Author:Tim Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

IN THE SHADOWS OF the hall, Swinburne stepped back from the doorway and hurried to his room so that he could pretend to have been asleep when someone came to summon him.

CHAPTER TWO

We shall know what the darkness discovers,

If the grave-pit be shallow or deep;

And our fathers of old, and our lovers,

We shall know if they sleep not or sleep.

—Algernon Swinburne, “Dolores”

A THIRD OF A mile north of Tudor House stood Pelham Crescent, a semicircular row of splendid white houses designed thirty years earlier by Elias Basevi, who had also been the architect of Belgrave Square. Separated from one another by iron railings like rows of upright black spears, each house’s doorway was up three steps from the pavement and framed by square pillars that supported a first-floor balcony. The gentlemen who entered or alighted from glossy carriages at the curb wore tall silk hats or the newer round creations of William Bowler, and their starched linen collars and cuffs were bright spots against well-tailored black overcoats.

From Number 7 on this February evening, though, emerged a contrary figure in a brown sack coat with an open-collared shirt and no hat; his white beard was untrimmed and his glance up and down the street was arrogant. Edward Trelawny waved his cane, and a hansom cab obediently slanted in to a rocking halt in front of him.

“New Cut Market,” he called to the driver, flipping a half-crown coin toward the man’s perch behind and above the cab.

The driver turned the coin carefully in the dim radiance of a streetlamp, but it evidently appeared genuine, for he tucked it into a pocket and nodded.

Trelawny snorted and stepped up into the cab.

As the long reins snapped over the roof and the cab surged forward, Trelawny sat stiffly upright, scornful of the padded seat back, but inwardly he was uneasy, and he was cautiously reassured by the angular bulk of the pistol tucked behind his belt buckle.

He had not seen anything of the terrible Miss B. for seven years now, not since two days after that Rossetti woman’s funeral. At that funeral he had learned the identity of the woman previously known to him only as “Diamonds,” and he had called on her at noon the next day.

She had received him in the parlor of a modest house in Albany Street, with her fat sister sitting beside her on the sofa while he sat in a chair on the other side of a table on which rested an array of tea and biscuits, which he had ignored.

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