And by trapping her a week ago, and breaking up her physical form, he had evidently lost her protective attention! Until a week ago the Carbonari would never have dared to threaten him with violence.
Trelawny forced himself to relax and think.
Perhaps this was the appropriate way for it all to end at last — Edward John Trelawny, onetime friend to Byron and Shelley, murdered by Carbonari agents in the yard of a London workhouse at the age of seventy-seven. He had long since made arrangements to be buried beside Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The goal of these Carbonari was to eradicate the vampire race and save London, just as his was—could he fight them?
He laughed silently and flexed his hands. Only to the death, he thought, and he rehearsed how he would draw his revolver and spring out of the cab on the left side, away from the men by the carriage.
The rattle of the cab was louder when it rocked in under the arch, and Trelawny quickly pushed the cab’s leather flap aside and rolled out, dropping to his hands and knees as he drew his revolver and noting the men’s legs and ankles as he brought the barrel up.
But one man simply dropped, with a spatter of red blood at his throat, and the others were now shouting and running; Trelawny got to his feet, cursing the pain in his knees that slowed him and set his heart to knocking.
The driver of his cab had drawn a revolver of his own, but he was pointing it away from Trelawny, at the other side of the cab. The pistol went off with a flare and a resounding crack, and then the man jumped down from the cab, landing awkwardly but limping away without a pause.
Two more pistol shots hammered the air under the arch, and somewhere on the other side of the horse a man screamed.
The mare was frantically shying away, backing the cab and grinding her flank against the brick wall, and Trelawny forced his sharply protesting knees to step back to avoid being knocked down and trampled. Through the slack reins he glimpsed men in some thrashing struggle, but his focus now was simply on the wedge of clear pavement between the wall and the jigging cab, and he grabbed the cab lamp with his free hand and pulled himself farther toward the rear of the cab, away from the stamping mare. He was panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes.
Then a squat figure had blocked the gray daylight in front of him, between the rear of the cab and the wall. Trelawny raised his shaking pistol and forced himself to focus on the lumpy silhouette, and he saw that it had no head, just a broad flat hat that rested right on its shoulders.
Trelawny recognized it — he had seen it in Rossetti’s bedroom only a few hours ago — but in that instant the thing once again dissolved into oily smoke, and when the gun jumped and cracked in Trelawny’s hand, it was too late. The pistol ball whacked into brick somewhere across the street.
Trelawny wasn’t able to take a deep breath, and his vision was darkening; and he didn’t resist when an arm caught him around the ribs and braced him up. He barely had the strength to lift the revolver and tuck it into his belt, and he let his unseen companion boost him up into the cab.
The long reins slid through the bracket on the roof and then were caught and drawn inside hand over hand, and the cab was rocking as the mare eagerly backed out of the shadowed arch into the bright yard.
After a few seconds of the cab rolling backward, the reins snapped and the mare snorted and stamped but began trotting obediently forward. Trelawny was rocked against the cab’s right panel.
He rolled his throbbing head to look at the stranger who was now driving the cab from inside.
The teeth were bared in a permanent rictus grin in the skeletal gray face, and its wide eyes swiveled toward him and then back to the horse. The spidery gray hands on the reins were splashed with fresh blood.
The thing spoke then, and its voice was a flat squeak: “A spirit present? In a sense!” And it reached up with its left hand and knocked once against the cab’s low ceiling. A few moments later it sighed, with a sound like sand spilling from a shovel.
It rolled its eyes toward Trelawny, and its involuntary grin widened. “Marry!” it said then in a voice like wood creaking. “Well, not the ceremony, but one part of ‘marry,’ yes!”
It reached up and knocked again.
GABRIEL HAD PULLED THE curtains across the brightening view of the river, and William had fetched the table while Christina assembled papers and pencils, and the first question they had asked when the three of them had sat down was, Is there a spirit present?
The table had shaken with a single knock — yes.
The next question had been, Are you Gabriel’s son, who wants to marry the horse-doctor’s daughter?
After a pause, there had again been a single knock.
“Our uncle,” said Christina now, speaking into the air below the high ceiling, “was locked up for seven years. Do you know how we might banish him forever?”
THE GRAY BOY HAD guided the cab into an alley across Limerston Street, and then its nimble fingers had untied the strings on a canvas rain-flap that tumbled down to block the view of shadowed windows and doors ahead. The only light in the cab’s narrow interior now was the dim reflection from the close brick walls visible through the windows on either side.
Trelawny made himself face his grotesque companion without flinching, though he allowed himself to press against the right panel. The creature had tucked a ragged parasol between its knees, and Trelawny noticed for the first time that it was wearing a big blanket wrapped around its shoulders like a toga, and a couple of little round holes in it seemed to be bullet holes, though there was no blood around them. The thing’s breath, he noticed, was colder than the outside air and smelled of river mud.
The dead boy had picked up the mirror box in its left hand and was clutching it to itself, away from Trelawny.
“I do know a way,” it said, and raised its right hand to the roof and rapped on it once.
THE TABLE SHOOK AT a single knock under Christina’s fingertips.
“How?” she whispered.
The clock on the mantel ticked off a dozen seconds, and William cleared his throat.
“Remember it can’t spell.”
“Does it,” asked Christina, “involve cutting Edward Trelawny’s throat?”
“THEY KNOW ABOUT YOU,” quacked the gray thing as it rapped the cab’s roof once. It wiggled its bloody fingers. “Just as these dead men did.”
“Those … dead men wanted to kill me.”
“Fools,” said the thing.
“They didn’t want the box,” Trelawny added, nodding toward the box in the thing’s left hand.
“Fools,” it said again.
Trelawny’s heart was knocking hollowly in his chest, and he had to take a breath to speak again.
“You … rescued me from them?”
“I rescued her,” the thing said, shaking the mirror box.
Trelawny’s head ached. “Stop hitting the roof, will you?”
The dead boy shrugged his knobby shoulders under the blanket. “I can do it just as well with my teeth.”
The thing wasn’t looking at him, so Trelawny let his hand slip toward the flap of his coat that concealed the revolver.
“THAT’S A YES,” SAID Gabriel. “I should have cut the old bastard’s throat in Regent’s Park.”
“I wonder if that’s what Maria won’t tell us,” said William. “She can’t condone murder.”
“Neither can we,” said Christina.
“What do you call killing our uncle?” asked William.
“He’s not human,” said Christina desperately, “and he’s died already, by his own hand.”
“You,” said Gabriel, speaking toward the ceiling, “had two human parents—”