“Why is he — here?” called Johanna.
“Speaking of hear,” growled Trelawny, “he’s not deaf.”
Polidori used to call me Josephine sometimes, she thought. That was my grandmother’s name, and she was supposed to be a particular favorite among his victims fifty years ago, though she got away from him in the end.
I’ll bet Polidori — and his dead boy — would rather have me than Trelawny’s granddaughter, if given a choice. All things considered! I’m in what Polidori would think of as his chosen family, and she’s not. He might let the granddaughter go, if he had me.
“Is that why you called me here, in the dream?” she asked, speaking into the wind in a normal tone so that Trelawny might or might not hear.
But he had heard. “Would you have stayed in France, either way?”
She shuffled along after him, tense and careful, without answering.
No, she thought, even if I’m just back here to be a red flag to distract a devil bull from a young girl, I’ll do it, I’ll be that. I can’t bear to think of another girl going through what I went through.
“You’re still a bastard,” she said.
“Now and forevermore,” Trelawny agreed. He had halted, his cape blowing around him more violently now. “We’re at the corner,” he said. “We can’t go any farther.”
At that, Johanna’s resolutely sustained control deserted her. Can’t go any farther? Her arms and legs tingled with sudden fright, and the ledge seemed narrower — the way back to the gable roof and the smoky chimneys seemed impossibly long and precarious, and her mother and father were blocking the way and might panic and refuse to move—!
And what if the earthquake wasn’t quite finished?
Breathing rapidly, she gripped the slanting eaves in front of her with no intention of ever letting go.
“So,” said Trelawny, “we’ll take the stairs down.” He swung one leg back, out over Whitefriars Street so far below, and then drove his knee forward into the top of the windowpane in front of him.
It shattered inward, the noise muffled and blown away by the wind.
Johanna realized that the first person to climb in would have no one to grab his hands and clothes while he crouched, but Trelawny let go of the eaves and squatted on the icy ledge with no evident qualms, and in the moment before he would have tipped over backward he reached out with his right hand, broke a wedge of glass out of the window frame, and then gripped the frame just as his weight came on it. Then his left hand gripped the opposite side and he hiked his legs forward into the dark room beyond. He disappeared inside, and she heard his boots knock on a wooden floor.
A moment later his squinting white-bearded face and one hand were back out in the wind.
“A little farther, child,” he said.
“I’m right behind you,” came her father’s strained voice.
In her panicky state it seemed suicidal to release her iron grip, but Johanna exhaled and took a deep breath, and was able to let go of the eaves she was clinging to and reach out to take hold of the one over Trelawny; the move made ice water of her guts, but she gritted her teeth and followed it with a shuffle forward, and then Trelawny had a firm hold of her waist.
“Lift your feet,” he said.
She did, and a moment later she was standing beside the old man in an unlighted slant-ceilinged room, hugging him and trembling.
“Still a bastard,” she whispered. He patted the top of her hat and then turned to the window to help her father in.
When all four of them were safely in the room, peering nervously at the cobwebby banks of wooden filing cabinets that hid all the walls, her father finally took off his hat and glared at Trelawny.
“Did you mean to trade Johanna for your granddaughter?”
“Keep — your voice down,” said Trelawny, panting. “We’re trespassing here, wherever this is.” He flexed his shaking fingers. “No, you fool, I don’t want that thing to have any bride at all. You think I want London destroyed? But I’m eighty-four years old — I can’t sprint across rooftops anymore, or swim the river, or — and your daughter knows his places.”
McKee went to the short door and opened it; after peering into the hallway beyond, she shut the door and stepped back to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. “Nobody about. But do let’s be quiet.” She turned to Trelawny, and the expression on her narrow face was one of concern. “You love your granddaughter.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said the old man. He lowered himself carefully to the floor and stretched his legs out. “Ah! I’ve only seen her twice, and the second time was when her mother was ordering me out of her house. Still, she’s a nice child.” He sighed. “It’s more that she’s my granddaughter, you see.”
“You … care about her, then, as much as you care about anything.”
Trelawny shrugged and nodded. “That sums it up.”
“Let my husband cut that stone out of your throat.”
Trelawny smiled at McKee. “No.”
“You’ll be saving two girls, Johanna here and your granddaughter, this girl Rose.”
“There’s other ways to stop Polidori,” said Trelawny irritably, “without killing me.”
“My husband is a skilled surgeon—”
Trelawny raised a hand to interrupt her. “And we need to find Rose in any case,” he said. “We can’t leave her clean but down a well somewhere.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “We need to get hold of the damned Rossettis again.”
Johanna sat down too. “I am helping in this,” she told her parents as she brushed out her short brown hair with her gloved fingers. “I can’t not.”
Crawford sighed and joined them on the floor. “The Rossettis? Are they still alive? What can they do?”
Trelawny lowered his hands and stared at the dim ceiling. “Five years ago! — I gave William Rossetti a protection. He had put together a book of Shelley’s poems, and I knew Shelley, and I helped William with the book and got to know him. I admire him, he’s a friend. And he was thinking about asking a woman to marry him, and he had … no conception of the peril he’d be putting her into, much less any children they might have. His brother and sisters knew, and I suppose they tried to tell him, but he was skeptical. Scientific. So I gave him my piece of Shelley’s jawbone, scorched from the funeral pyre. It deflects the attention of … those things.”
Johanna blinked at him. “You never offered me that.”
“I thought you were off to America. If you’d all just go to America and stay there, I wouldn’t have all these problems.”
“You wouldn’t have problems!” said Crawford, and he began coughing again.
“So William has the Shelley jawbone?” said McKee quickly.
“That’s right. He gave it back to me at first, after showing it around to his friends as if it were a — a morbid relic or souvenir—he told me he really had no use for it. It was unsanitary. But three years ago he finally did get married, and his wife started having nightmares, when she could sleep at all, and their first child miscarried, and her brother whom they were both fond of flopped down dead at the age of nineteen — and William came back to me then, and begged me to give it back to him! I did, and now his wife’s recovered and he’s got a baby daughter who seems healthy.”
“‘London destroyed,’” echoed Crawford belatedly. “How would the dead boy destroy London, just by getting a bride?”