Crawford gingerly patted his way around McKee and then preceded her up the new iron ladder, and when his head bumped a metal grating, he felt along the bars of it until he was touching the latch, and he managed to climb a few rungs back down as he lowered it on its hinges with one hand.
Above that was a square of solid iron, but it was hinged too, and he trusted the new ladder not to break under his boots when he braced his shoulders under the manhole cover and forced it upward. It squeaked up — he braced his hands in dazzling gray daylight on the steel rim embedded in the street pavement, and pushed — and then the cover fell away behind him with a loud clang that echoed between close housefronts.
He didn’t hear hooves or wheels bearing down on him, so before looking around, he scrambled out of the shaft and reached down for McKee’s hand. And when they had both got to their feet on the crushed stone of the street surface, and he had swung the iron cover back into place, and he and McKee had stumbled to a curb, he saw through narrowed eyes that they were in front of a pastry shop window.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” he croaked. “I’ve got some money.”
Then he flinched at a woman’s harsh voice from behind them. “Breaking into cellars, then, were you?”
Crawford turned toward the voice. In the gray but blinding daylight, an enormous woman in an apron was striding across the street toward them.
“You’re the ones made off with my pig, eh?” she went on loudly.
“No, no,” called Crawford hoarsely, “street collapsed in Highgate — women and children swept into the sewers—”
“Come along,” muttered McKee, grabbing his arm and pulling him into a trot.
“Get help!” yelled Crawford for verisimilitude over his shoulder. “Ropes, ladders!”
He had at least succeeded in baffling the woman, who had stopped and was looking uneasily at the manhole cover.
McKee had yanked Crawford around a corner and the two of them were now walking, as briskly as they could in their clinging wet clothes, against a bone-chilling headwind that made his eyes water. She had let go of his arm.
“Tea!” she said scornfully. “We look like we crawled out of a cesspool!”
Crawford looked at her as she strode along, then glanced down at himself.
It was true. Her dress and his shirt and trousers were slimed with what he hoped was just black mud, though in truth both of them smelled pretty horrible. His beard was stiff with dried blood, and McKee’s dark hair looked like a plundered bird’s nest.
They had been walking south down the middle of a rutted dirt road between old overhanging Tudor houses, stared at with disfavor but with no active interference by a couple of cart drivers who passed them, but now McKee stopped, hugging herself and shivering.
She faced Crawford and spoke clearly. “Our daughter is dead — and thank God she will at least stay dead, with the resurrecting devil killed too.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m leaving London. There’s nothing I can hope for in this city.” She squinted at him, as if to fix his face in her memory. “This village is Lower Clapton — I know it well, I’ve often caught birds near here. Kingsland Road is that way,” she said, waving to the east, “and if you walk south along it for two or three miles, you’ll get to the river at London Bridge. I suggest you jump right in.”
“Can I—” he began; then he shook himself and just said, “I wish you would stay.”
“It would only remind me of lost and impossible things. Everything you and I had in common is gone.” She turned and began striding away in the direction opposite to the way she had directed him.
“Adelaide!” he called after her, but she didn’t alter her pace.
When Polidori had vanished, Crawford had felt his mind popping by degrees back out to its former extent, like a half-crushed hat being poked back into shape; now one last dent seemed to spring back out, though it felt as if he’d been living with this one for years.
“Adelaide,” he yelled desperately, “marry me!”
She hunched in her ragged and fouled clothes, as if someone had thrown a stone at her, but kept walking — and through one last dissolving thread of the compaction that Polidori’s attack had imposed on their minds, he caught a final thought from her: So we can have more children?
Implicit in the thought were the names Johanna and Girard.
That froze him in place for a moment; then he was stumbling after her in his sopping trousers, ignoring the horrified cries of a crowd of children leaping out of his way.
McKee had rounded the corner of an old three-story whitewashed public house, and when he came skidding around it after her, she had disappeared.
A narrow lane or alley lay between the pub and a stable on the far side, and he hurried to it, but she was not visible between the old structures and there were no apparent doors or gates she could have gone through. A mongrel dog lying on the path lifted its head mistrustfully.
He walked back to the pub entrance, but as soon as he had pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped into the blessedly warm lamplit interior, several men in shiny corduroy jackets blocked his way.
“Smell too bad, you do,” said one of them, extending an arm to keep Crawford back.
“Don’t want us to bust you up, now, do you?” asked the other cheerfully. “Just shove off then, there’s a good boy.”
Crawford stepped back and stared at them while he caught his breath.
“I’m a friend of hers,” he said at last. “You must have noticed that she was as … soiled as I am.”
“Soiled women! Not in here, mate. And it’s up to her who her friends are.”
Crawford looked from one of the two amiably implacable faces to the other. McKee had said she caught birds near here, knew this village — doubtless she was known at this pub and had hastily told these friends of hers to keep him out.
Other men were visible now behind these two.
Crawford opened his mouth and yelled, “Adelaide!” as loudly as he could — and a moment later he was lying on his side in the road, clutching his abdomen and trying to get breath into his stunned lungs, and gradually realizing that one of the men had punched him very hard in the stomach.
He rolled over and saw the man grimacing and rubbing his knuckles on his sleeve.
Two men behind him in the doorway were now holding empty beer bottles by the necks.
Crawford waved and shook his head and slowly got back up on his feet, able now to take short, wheezing gasps.
The men in the doorway watched impassively as he struggled to catch his breath.
“I’m — leaving,” he finally managed to say. “Tell her — I love her.”
Their expressions didn’t change.
He turned away and began slowly plodding toward Kingsland Road, aching and limping and shivering in the cold.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Thank God who spared me what I feared!
Once more I gird myself to run.
Thy promise stands, Thou Faithful One.
Horror of darkness disappeared
At length: once more I see the sun…
GREEN LEAVES THREW waving shadows on the glass of the window overlooking Albany Street, and through the open front door swept a warm breeze carrying the scent of robinia blossoms.