Crawford and McKee both bent to retrieve them and knocked their heads together; McKee’s bonnet fell down over her face and she sat down, whispering curses as she shoved it back into place.
Crawford sat down too. He had managed to pick up one of the cakes, and he scowled at it while he rubbed his forehead. The wax seal had cracked, and the imprinted skull was split — the smaller piece came off in his palm.
“Here’s Death’s jawbone,” he told Christina, and the ringing in his ears made him speak more loudly than he meant to.
Someone lagging behind the tail end of the mourners’ procession was suddenly leaning over him.
“To whom are you referring, sir?” came a harsh whisper.
Crawford blinked up at the speaker and was not very surprised to recognize Trelawny. The old man had hung back from the rest of the crowd and seemed to be more observer than mourner.
Crawford mutely held out the fragment of black wax. “This,” he croaked.
“Ah!” said Trelawny scornfully. “You clowns again! Diamonds, you do yourself no service associating with these idiots.”
Christina’s lips were pressed together, and she nodded solemnly. “But, Samson, can you juggle?” she asked him, crouching to retrieve the third cake and taking the others from McKee and Crawford and holding them all out toward Trelawny.
The old man looked past Christina’s shoulder, and apparently saw that the funeral party had all exited the chapel; and then he tossed one of the cakes in the air and followed it with the other two, and in a moment he had all three whirling in a crisscross pattern in front of his face.
When he had done it for enough seconds to demonstrate that he could, he let one hand drop to his side, caught all three cakes in the other, and handed them back to Christina.
“Anybody can do three,” he said. “I can do five.”
Christina stepped past him into the aisle. “Will you all be so kind as to accompany me to the committal?” She was smiling, but her face was pale. “You are all wonderfully diverting.”
Trelawny scowled and rocked on his heels for a moment, then shrugged and took her arm and started for the rear of the chapel. He sniffed the air. “It’s you he’s paying such intense attention to, isn’t it?”
Crawford and McKee shuffled along behind them, listening.
“Yes,” said Christina in a strained voice. “It was this way at my father’s funeral too — I should have known it would happen again, when I’m — once more within a stone’s throw of where the statue which is his core is buried.”
“A stone’s throw,” said Trelawny hollowly, shaking his white-maned head. “And you know where it’s buried? I’ve been here several times, during this past week.” He jerked a thumb back at McKee and Crawford. “Saw Rahab and Medicus here once, though I made sure they didn’t see me.”
“But I can ignore his … wordless song,” Christina went on, “while I have you three to tell me things like … what cures cat malaise.”
“Veal,” said Trelawny firmly.
“Just as I said,” put in Crawford.
The gray daylight outside seemed bright after the dimness of the chapel, but the air was colder, and Crawford shivered and squinted after the funeral procession. The line of mourners had crossed a gravel-paved yard and was mounting a short stone stairway between high walls with tall green cypress trees beyond.
Christina hurried after them, her boots crunching in the windy silence, and Trelawny and Crawford and McKee lengthened their strides to catch up.
At the top of the steps the funeral party was shuffling and bobbing down a lane between trees and patchy lawns to the left, and Christina stepped after them — but McKee halted and caught Crawford’s upper arm in a tight grip.
He glanced at her and noticed her wide-eyed stare — she was looking to the right, away from the funeral procession, and he nervously followed her gaze.
There was a small figure standing in deep shadow between a vine-draped oak and a marble monument with a stone dog on it.
It appeared to be a thin little girl standing there, and Crawford felt his scalp tighten and the backs of his hands tingle before he consciously realized who it might be.
McKee had released Crawford’s arm and was hurrying across the gravel path toward the shadowy figure; Crawford looked back — Trelawny had paused, and met Crawford’s eye and waved him on impatiently before turning away and following Christina.
Crawford ran after McKee and skidded to a halt when she paused on the verge of the grass.
“Johanna?” called McKee hoarsely, half extending her hands.
It was indeed a girl, Crawford could see now, and she stepped back out of the shadows into the gray daylight — she wore a long-sleeved black shift but her feet were just wrapped in bundled rags; the limp brim of a floppy hat framed and shadowed her face, and her hair was a weedy tangle over enormous dark eyes.
“I’m — your mother,” said McKee, her voice breaking.
Crawford took a breath. “And I’m your father,” he said.
“We want to take you home,” McKee said.
The girl blinked at them in evident confusion, and then she spun and began sprinting away across the hilly grass between the tall tombstones.
McKee hiked up her skirt and went running after her, and Crawford was right behind her.
The girl was shorter than many of the monuments along the lane, and while McKee ran straight after her, Crawford slanted out to the right and ran along the path, hoping to see the girl as she darted between the tall gray tombs and obelisks.
He was sure he was running faster than she was, but after a dozen paces he let himself clop and scuff to a halt.
“She disappeared,” he called to McKee, who was running more slowly on the damp grass.
McKee shook her head and kept running. When she had got even with Crawford, though, she stopped, panting and almost sobbing.
“She’s close by,” she gasped. “We must search among the graves.”
What do we do if we catch her? wondered Crawford; but he nodded and began striding through the grass between the gravestones.
He quickly saw that there were only a few corners in the immediate area where even a very small person could hide, and within a minute he and McKee had walked around all the nearby blocks and columns of marble, and peered up into the bare tree branches, and were standing face-to-face.
“She’s alive,” panted McKee. “She can’t have vanished.”
Crawford remembered the way the doglike creature that Trelawny had called Miss B. had disappeared in Regent’s Park last Tuesday, and he strode around the nearby stones peering more carefully at the damp grass; and at the foot of a chest-high granite tomb set against a low hill he noticed a patch of newly flattened grass blades.
He walked over to look at it more closely. The crushed area, he saw, extended right to the wall of the tomb — and some grass blades appeared to be lying under it.
The tomb wall was divided into nine coffered squares, each about a foot and a half across, and the streak of flattened grass was centered on the middle square of the bottom row.
He crouched beside it. “I think,” he began, and he pushed at the stone square. It slid inward.
McKee was beside him then, and she pushed it in as far as she could without lying down; and then she pulled her hat off and lay down prone on the damp grass and pushed the block inward until her shoulder was against the stone wall of the tomb. When she pulled her arm out, she was holding the hat the child had been wearing.
“I can fit through here,” McKee said, and she stretched her arms through the hole and began to pull herself forward.