In the long fingers of its free hand it carried a tiny fragment of broken mirror.
Its ribs flexed in and out for several minutes under its gray skin while its tiny black eyes swiveled around, scanning the clearing under the elms. Then it got its legs under itself and stood up; and the parasol wobbled over it as it took high steps to a rose bush a few yards away.
In a hollow under the rose bush, hidden from the view of any person more than three feet tall, was a substantial pile of tiny mirror pieces, and the gray creature laid this last one down and then hunched away to the roots of the nearest tree, and its spidery fingers began scrabbling in the damp dirt for beetles; when it found one, it stuffed the wiggling thing into its mouth and began chewing eagerly and immediately commenced digging for another.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI WAS STARING absently at one of the ukiyo-e prints that William had hung on the grasscloth-lined walls of the drawing room. The wood-block print, rendered in several colors by incomprehensibly patient Japanese artisans, was a view of a mountain that seemed to be floating in the white sky, and Christina was frowning, for there was something ominous in the idea of a mountain freed from the surface of the earth.
She looked away from it finally and laid down her pen in order to refill her glass from the sherry decanter. Her new physician, Doctor Jenner, had advised her to sleep late, eat plenty of carrageen seaweed jelly, and drink what seemed to Christina to be extravagant amounts of sherry.
Her ailment or ailments were obscure, their only symptoms being a constant cough and listlessness. Certainly this malaise was preferable to the anemia and angina pectoris and nightmares from which she had suffered prior to Lizzie’s funeral seven years ago. Sometimes Christina suspected that her present lack of energy and alertness, and Gabriel’s failing eyesight and insomnia, were consequences of being deprived of some supernatural sustenance their uncle had been providing … before they choked him with the mirrors at the funeral.
She sighed and got slowly to her feet, taking the glass with her to the French doors; they opened onto the first-floor balcony, and she blinked through the panes at the Ionic columns of St. Pancras Church across Upper Woburn Place, and at the red-and-gold trees in Euston Square off to the left. Evening had fallen, and only the topmost spires and chimney pots were still touched with a rosy glow.
Her brother Gabriel had found a house to rent in Cheyne Walk down in Chelsea, but two years ago the rest of the family had moved from Albany Street a few streets west of here to this house on Euston Square.
She opened the window door and stepped out onto the roofed balcony. The breeze was chilly through her flannel nightgown, and smelled of smoke from a hundred chimneys.
Of course they were still living on William’s salary from the Inland Revenue office, which only this year had risen to eight hundred pounds. Three years ago the banking and broking firm Overend Gurney had failed, and in the ensuing financial crisis and recession, many other firms had collapsed too — there had been panic and even bread riots — but William’s government position had insulated the Rossettis from anxiety.
None of the other siblings could help appreciably. Gabriel squandered his money. Maria was teaching Italian and had written a textbook, and Christina earned royalties on the British and American editions of Goblin Market, but together the sisters added less than two hundred pounds to the household income in a year. And Maria was forty-two and Christina was nearly thirty-nine now, and neither was likely to marry.
The leaves on the curbside chestnut trees were still green, and between the boughs she saw shiny carriages and hansom cabs whirring along Upper Woburn Place. Their neighbors here were respectable stockbrokers and lawyers, but Christina missed the old house on Albany Street, where most of the family had lived for thirteen years.
She had written poetry there, for a time.
She shook her head impatiently and took a sip of the sherry. What was she thinking — she still wrote poetry!
— At a more labored pace, and without the psychic spark she had felt while writing verses before 1862.
Some of the poems that she had written since then had been published by Macmillan three years ago, in a volume titled The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems … and the Saturday Review had noted “a good many tame and rather slovenly verses” and “a dull, pointless cadence” in it. In the Athenaeum, a reviewer had said, “We do not see the conflict of the heart, but the sequel of that conflict,” and had lamented that the tone of the poems was that of a dirge.
Christina drained the glass of sweet wine and clanked it down on the rail so hard that the stem snapped off.
My life has a dull, pointless cadence, she thought furiously; I am in the sequel of that conflict, and a dirge is the appropriate tone!
She still regularly wrote prose pieces — mostly religious short stories now, for the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine—but she couldn’t pretend that they had the sprightly warmth of the work she had done before 1862.
Well, so be it. If her inspired poetry depended on the attentions of a devil, she was incalculably better off without it.
She turned back toward the drawing room, glancing at her hand to see if she had cut herself. There was no blood, but her thumb and forefinger were stained with ink. What had she been writing, while staring idly at the Japanese mountain?
A notebook lay open on the table beside her chair, and she laid down the broken pieces of the glass and picked it up.
And when she read the first lines that she had written on the open page, she knew what it was — more of “Folio Q.”
Her face was suddenly hot. She repressed a quick smile but reached out with her mind to see if the remembered psychic attention was again there — and she sensed only vacancy, a yawning silence.
If his personal attention had been turned on her once again, after these seven years of absence, she wouldn’t have needed the evidence of the renewed story in the notebook; she would immediately have felt it in her mind like tingling in a newly unconstricted limb.
Seven years ago she had speculated to Gabriel and Maria that her uncle — ghost or vampire or whatever he was — was not deliberately writing through Christina’s hand at those times when she had found herself writing “Folio Q,” that Uncle John might not even have been aware that she had been physically transcribing his story.
Eagerly she scanned the lines, but though they were in the familiar handwriting of her uncle’s spirit, they were disjointed and rambling:
… there need not be … wisdom or even memory … shall I not one day remember thy bower, one day when all days are one day to me? You have been mine before — how long ago I may not know: but just when at that swallow’s soar, your neck turned so, some veil did fall…
So he was somehow up again, now, awake again, but the fullness of the old connection had not been restored.
She reached out again with her mind, but she could not sense him.
Evidently the mirror confusion they had imposed on him seven years ago, though it had not lasted forever as she and Maria had hoped, had at least severed the link that had connected her with her uncle since that night when, at the age of fourteen, she had rubbed her blood on the tiny statue.
If that were so, she could still go out in the sunlight without being burned … but by the same token she would still suffer from her current distracted listlessness … and she would still not be able to write the sort of poetry she had written before Lizzie’s funeral.