“Can we … get it,” said Christina, “from Algy? He’ll have hidden it.”
“We could torture him,” said Gabriel with a shrug, “but he’d like that.”
“Appeal to him?” suggested William. “In friendship?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Try appealing to a drunkard, in friendship. And this is vastly more compelling than drink.”
“We must none of us marry, or have children,” said Christina. “William, you and Maria have been safe up till now, you’re apparently considered members of its family somehow — possibly because you grew up with the statue, you participated in its renaming of us all as card suits — a provisional protection at best, I think. You both need to begin taking precautions. Whenever—”
“Never marry?” protested William. “Never have children? Because a ghost would be jealous? I’m forty years old, I can’t—”
“He’s more than a ghost!” interrupted Christina. “You were there at the séance on Tuesday — and I think you saw him, and he even spoke to you, in your vision! I think he spoke to each of us.”
William opened his mouth and then looked away, and in that instant Christina was sure that William had somehow met their uncle again, since the séance.
“You said he kills people we love,” William went on stubbornly, still looking away. “Whom has he killed?”
“Well — he killed that veterinary surgeon’s wife and sons…”
“He did?” William was looking at her now. “When was this? Killed them how?”
“Fifteen or twenty years ago,” admitted Christina. “They were on a boat on the river…”
“I’ll wager the coroner came to a different conclusion than ‘killed by a ghost.’”
“Oh — your children will die, William, trust me! Gabriel, do séances have to be done at night?”
“Hmm?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. They always seem to be.”
“I can think of one ghost that might know how to unmake our uncle — your son. The dead boy. And ghosts don’t seem to be able to lie.”
“Oh God. He’s not my son. No, damn it, he is my son — how did our poor father do this to us?” He got to his feet, looking much older than his forty-one years. “Not that we didn’t cooperate.” He held up one trembling hand. “Me too, ’Stina; I did it too.”
“I haven’t done it,” said William, and Christina was unhappily sure that the statement had an unspoken yet at the end of it.
“Fetch your pencils and papers,” said Christina. “If the creature can appear in your bedroom during the day, it can likely participate in a daytime séance.”
THE CAB DRIVER WHO slanted his two-wheeled hansom cab in toward the curb when Trelawny waved at him didn’t register any surprise or suspicion at being hailed by such a wild-haired and casually dressed figure in front of a Pelham Crescent house, and he didn’t ask to see the money in advance, so Trelawny assumed that the man had dealt with him before.
“A tour of the river,” he said as he climbed in. “Battersea Bridge first.”
The morning’s rain had stopped, and the arches and chimneys and business signs of the buildings along the Fulham Road flickered and dimmed with the intermittent returning sunlight.
He took out the box from under his coat and laid it on the seat beside him. “A last look ’round,” he said to it, squinting against the bracing headwind. “You always preferred the night, but — can you hear me, even all broken up? The hell of it is, I know you still love me.” He patted it with his wrinkled old hand. “We have had some times, these twelve years — haven’t we? — since I found you in that ravine, and took you in.”
This morning he had realized, with a chill, that he had not yet disposed of the box containing the petrified kernel of the Boadicea creature. And when this thought was quickly followed by a lately familiar breezy feeling that all was well and he should think of something else, he recognized the latter thought as … not his own.
Immediately he had pulled the mirror box out from under his bed, fetched a hammer from the downstairs kitchen, and on the fireplace hearth he had spilled the tiny statue out of the mirror box and quickly pounded it to tiny fragments. Then he had carefully swept up all the broken pieces, along with a good deal of the inadvertently shattered hearth bricks, and tipped them back into the mirror box.
And now he was going to sift a third of the debris into the river from Battersea Bridge, a third from Waterloo Bridge, and the last, down to the final shake of dust, from London Bridge.
The cab rattled on past Beaufort Street, which was the most direct way to the bridge; Trelawny glared up over his shoulder toward the driver, but the man had closed the communicating hatch. Then the vehicle went right past Park Walk too, and Trelawny reached out through the open side window and pounded on the outside of the cab.
“Idiot!” he yelled. “Turn south!”
The reins slithered through the bracket on the roof and the cab slowed, and at the same time a young man ran up alongside on the right and hopped up onto the step in front of the wheel, leaning in over Trelawny. He was smiling under disordered curly dark hair, and he was holding a wide-barreled old flintlock pistol aimed at Trelawny’s side.
“Silver bullets,” he said, with an accent Trelawny recognized as Italian. “Just sit tight for another minute.”
From where he sat, Trelawny couldn’t hope to knock the pistol aside, nor reach his own at all quickly.
The cab finally turned right, between the close buildings of Limerston Street, and then it was steered into the yard of the gray, narrow-windowed Chelsea Workhouse. The smell of bad meat and old oil was beginning to reassert itself over the acid scent of rain-washed pavement.
The mare had slowed to a walk, and the cab was rolling slowly toward a shadowed arch at the north end of the four-story building, where three men stood around a good-sized carriage with a couple of horses harnessed to it.
One of the men stepped out of the shadows and held up his hand — and even at a distance of a dozen yards Trelawny saw the black mark on the palm.
“You’re Carbonari,” he said to the man on the cab’s step. “Don’t interfere with me — in this box I’ve got the female vampire herself, petrified and shattered. I’m going to scatter her into the river.”
“That was good work,” said the man, smiling and cocking his head. “We’ll toss your box in a dustbin for you.”
“Dustbin? You idiot, did you understand what I said? It’s the female vampire, the British one! Let me explain it to one of your dago friends who has more English.”
“The vampires are about to be made obsolete,” the man said, speaking the term with relish.
Trelawny guessed what the man must mean by “made obsolete,” and he yawned and tensed himself for a grab at the gun barrel.
“Na-ah,” the man said, hopping backward off the step to the cobblestones and raising his pistol to aim it at Trelawny’s head. “We may not kill you if you play along, but we got no reluctance to deal with your corpse.”
“May not kill me!” said Trelawny bitterly, relaxing back into the seat. “By cutting my throat!”
“Our man is a surgeon,” called the young Carbonari, walking alongside the cab now and keeping the pistol raised. “He’ll try to do no more cutting than’s necessary to stop you being the bridge man.”
Trelawny made himself breathe deeply and evenly. He touched his throat, feeling the bulge of the stone lump behind the pulse of his jugular. The thing had definitely grown, in these dozen years since he had invited Miss B. to come home with him.