“The dead boy is a child, or product, at any rate, of Miss B.,” said Trelawny. “You remember her, I’m sure! She had largely assumed that poor woman Rossetti married, Dizzy or some such name; you remember her funeral. And if Polidori can raise up from the dead a girl who’s a member of his family — and he’s choosy about that! — the two can, if we stretch the term, marry.”
McKee started to interrupt, but Trelawny frowned and went on, “The thing that is Miss B. is British, as British as the Cotswold Hills; in a sense she is the Cotswold Hills! And the thing that is Polidori is European, specifically Alpine. The offspring of their families, of their continents, would exert an actual physical tug across the Channel.” He nodded at Crawford. “Earthquake.”
“To destroy London?” said Crawford. “There are never earthquakes in London.” He paused. “Well, until today.”
“A minor local one,” agreed Trelawny, “just from your daughter and the dead boy being in proximity. And Rossetti’s house shook, if you recall, when they were briefly in proximity in his bedroom seven years ago! And she, Miss B., destroyed London with an earthquake eighteen hundred years ago, when her resurrected British daughter gave birth to a child, so to speak, by a resurrected Roman soldier. She’d very much like to do it again.”
“Did the … child live?” asked McKee.
“The child was the earthquake,” said Trelawny. “It lived less than a minute.”
Johanna could see that her parents didn’t believe this story, but she remembered a vision she’d had seven years ago, in which astronomically vast wheels had pulled a city apart, rupturing underground rivers and toppling towers.
“I don’t have those hide shoes anymore,” she said. “Let’s get this jawbone before sundown.”
CHAPTER TWO
Venus-cum-Iris Mouse
From shifting tides set safe apart,
In no mere bottle, in my heart
Keep house.
IN THE DIMMING daylight to the west, Christina Rossetti could see the Charing Cross Hotel and railway station, and she remembered the Hungerford Market that had stood where the hotel and railway station were now.
Her dress, shawl, and bonnet were black.
“Oh, I’ve outlived my London,” she said, turning to William, who was holding her elbow. “With Maria gone, I feel like a ghost myself. This modern London is for people like your new son, not for me.”
They were here so that she could show him the spot where she had talked with their father’s ghost fourteen years earlier, and the two of them were standing below the central arch of the York water gate — but the stairs that had once led her down to the watermen’s shed on the river shore now ended, after only two steps, at a wide gravel pavement, beyond which stretched a broad landscape of snow-covered lawns and paths. The new Victoria Embankment had pushed the river shore a hundred yards out from this spot, and from here she couldn’t see the water at all.
“It was … there,” she told William, pointing at the snowy ground to her right, “about twenty feet below the surface now, where I talked with the watermen. I wonder if their shed is still down there, buried!”
She remembered the old waterman, Hake, telling her, We’re well after being ghosts ourselves, and she shivered now in the cold.
“And I saw Papa … a bit farther on.”
She hobbled down the steps, leaning on William’s arm as he matched her pace. After walking several yards through the snow, she stopped and pointed down.
“About here.”
William obediently stared down at the frozen grass for a moment, then peered around at the leafless trees and lampposts standing up from the whiteness.
“I expect he’s at peace now,” he muttered.
“He was, from the moment of his death,” said Christina. “I’m sure he went directly to Heaven. But I trust his ghost has dissipated by now — certainly I don’t sense him at all here. One of the watermen told me it was remarkable that Papa’s had lasted eight years — and it’s been nearly a quarter of a century now.”
William steered her back toward the arch. “Thank you for showing it to me,” he said, “but we should find a cab and get you home. This winter doesn’t seem as if it ever means to make way for spring.”
Christina sighed and nodded. William had brought this outing on himself, by quizzing her this afternoon about what dangers their uncle might still pose to his growing family. Only two days ago his wife, Lucy, had given birth to their second child, a healthy boy they had named Gabriel Arthur Madox Rossetti.
The discussion had started with Maria’s ghost.
Their sister, Maria, had died three months earlier, of cancer, at the All Saint’s convent in Margaret Street, and the sisters had refused permission to Christina and her mother to view the body in the coffin, or even to enter the convent mortuary. Christina assumed it was because the sisters recognized the ineradicable Nephilim mark on her soul and therefore feared that she would try to capture Maria’s ghost — and in fact Christina had worried about Maria’s ghost, cut off from the Heaven-bound soul and perhaps swimming about disconsolately in the cold river. All fear one another, her father’s ghost had told her, fourteen years ago; river worms now… Ugly, crushed, blind … this waits for you all too, remember.
Christina had no doubt that it waited for herself and Gabriel and William, but she had been unable to bear the thought of even a half-sentient fragment of gentle Maria drifting fearfully in the cold river at night, part of what they had called the Sea-People Chorus…
And so she had been inexpressibly grateful when poor, silly, gallant old Charles Cayley had, on New Year’s Day, given her Maria’s captured ghost.
Cayley had said, with fastidious embarrassment, that he was distressed to see Christina so unhappy, and that he had learned from her that there was another London behind the one he had grown up in. And so he had consulted a series of “spiritualists” who had pointed him eventually to one of several magicians living in the sewers — and, through a hired intermediary, Cayley had had to deliver several cages full of songbirds to the magician in exchange for the peculiar sea creature that contained Maria’s ghost.
Cayley had given it to her preserved in a wine bottle filled with brandy. It was a kind of worm called a “sea mouse,” or more properly an example of Aphrodita aculeata.
It was a little oval thing no bigger than a baby’s shoe, furred with fine crystalline hairs that shifted from blue to green to red as one turned the bottle in the light.
Cayley had provided the magician with various items to draw the ghost to shore, where it could be netted — a copy of a book Maria had written, Letters to My Bible Class, and an old hairbrush of hers, and a sliver from the wooden floor of the old family house on Charlotte Street, which was now a City Registrar’s office — and Cayley had not been cheated. Though the creature itself was dead, swirling in the amber brandy, Christina could clearly feel her sister’s presence when she held the bottle.
Christina kept the bottle in her bedroom, and sometimes read Tennyson to it by candlelight when the night beyond the windows was especially cold and stormy.
This afternoon in Christina’s parlor, William had again obediently held up the bottle and peered into it, though he never sensed any presence of Maria in it. Then he had asked her whether a captive ghost—“I mean a contained and protected ghost,” he had added hastily, putting the bottle down — might be a protection for his new family against the lethal attentions of their uncle. Christina had for three years known about the piece of Shelley’s jawbone, which seemed so far to be effectively serving that purpose, and William had wondered aloud whether its evident power might derive from some fragment of Shelley’s ghost still adhering to it.