McKee and Johanna sat down in the front pew, and the priest stood between it and the communion rail.
“Annulled?” he said finally. “Why? I don’t think you’ve been married twelve hours yet.”
“Because,” said McKee in a tightly controlled voice, “my husband has — unmerciful God! — had the misfortune to fall prey — to the devils we mentioned yesterday.” She inhaled and went on speaking. “My daughter — our daughter, and I, have to hide from him now, and I’m afraid the sacramental bond of marriage might be a thread he and his new master could follow.”
Wind sighed against the stained-glass window, and the doors through which they’d entered, facing Bozier’s Court, rattled on their hinges, making both McKee and Johanna jump.
The priest glanced toward the rear of the church and then looked again at McKee.
“The marriage has not been consummated?” he asked, and McKee turned her face away from the candle’s dim amber glow.
“No,” she said. “We’ve — been busy.”
“An annulment would take time.”
“We don’t have time,” said McKee, her voice cracking. “We’ve wasted more than an hour selling things in the New Cut Market, and we need to be on a boat bound somewhere tomorrow morning.”
“I’m sorry, Adelaide — I could destroy the record and you could destroy the certificate, but—”
“That would only erase it in legal terms,” said McKee, nodding hopelessly.
“An annulment,” said Father Cyprian, “even a simple and uncontested one on the basis of non-consummation, would still have to come through the bishop.” He spread his hands. “But it may be that the — the spiritual bond between you and him has not yet been forged.”
“It’s forged,” said Johanna. “I’m the forgery.” She sniffed. “The marriage was consummated — in advance, thirteen or fourteen years ago.”
“That may be true,” McKee whispered; and in the same moment, from the darkness at the back of the church, came Crawford’s voice: “That’s true.”
McKee uttered a short scream and whirled around in the pew, her hand darting under her coat; Johanna scrambled to stand on the pew, facing backward; and the priest raised his voice:
“You have no power here.”
“I have no p-power anywhere,” said Crawford hoarsely, shambling forward. “Adelaide, Johanna — I’ve escaped him, the way Trelawny did in America, by drowning myself. Throw—” He was interrupted by a fit of harsh coughing, and his hands slapped one of the middle pew backs. “Throw garlic at me. Or roll your j-jar down here and I’ll eat it.” He gave a shaky laugh. “Wait till dawn and I’ll — dance naked in direct sunlight.”
Johanna took the candle from the priest and began walking down the aisle toward Crawford.
McKee shouted, “Johanna, don’t!” She drew her knife and ran after her, but Johanna began running too, and the candle went out; and when McKee caught up with her daughter, the girl was already in Crawford’s arms.
“Don’t stab him!” yelled Johanna. “He’s right! I’d know!”
“Get away from him,” said McKee through clenched teeth.
“No! I say he’s clean, and I was a Lark!”
“Was.” Holding her knife half extended for a stab, McKee reached out tensely with her free hand to pull Johanna out of the way; and she touched Crawford’s sleeve. Then she let her fingers tap across his waistcoat.
“You’re soaked,” she said. “And shivering.”
“I j-jumped into the river,” he said. “Again. This time I went all the way to the bottom, and — and I very nearly died, but — ghosts found me and revived me.”
“Ghosts did?” said McKee. “What ghosts?”
Crawford exhaled, and McKee got the impression that it was so that his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “Old friends,” he said. “I–I look forward to seeing them again, when my time comes.”
McKee didn’t move for several seconds, then swore and tucked her knife back into its sheath.
“Father,” she said, turning back toward the dimly visible altar, “never mind the annulment, but could we buy some dry clothes from you?”
THE DOVER-TO-DUNKIRK STEAMSHIP WAS a 180-foot side-wheeler, and though its funnel was puffing black smoke into the blue morning sky and the pistons drummed under the deck, two sails on its foremast appeared to be doing most of the work. Beyond the white sails, the remote blue sky met the sea in every direction.
Crawford and McKee and Johanna were huddled with a dozen other passengers just aft of the big starboard wheel cowling. Crawford’s cough had not abated, and he hugged himself inside the overcoat he had bought at a train stop in Maidstone.
“Sorry,” he gasped after the latest coughing fit. “Thames water doesn’t seem to be good for one’s lungs.”
“The cats,” said Johanna, holding on to her hat in the breeze from behind, “probably gave you an extra life or two.”
McKee just shook her head, staring out at the green waves of the English Channel. Crawford knew she was worried about his health, and the money that they were spending much more rapidly than planned, and the prospect of beginning life anew in a country whose inhabitants spoke a language she didn’t know.
They were still an hour out of Dunkirk, and they had been told that the tide would be low there, and that the ship would not dock but land passengers in rowboats.
Crawford said to McKee, “What shall we have for le petit déjeuner, Madame Crawford?”
McKee had learned that much from him on the train. “Frogs,” she said.
“Great bread and cheese,” countered Crawford.
“And wine,” put in Johanna.
“Will we ever come back?” burst out McKee. “Will we ever … see London again?”
Crawford leaned against the tall cowling, feeling the vibration of the big paddle wheel turning inside it.
“I think we had better hope not,” he said.
BOOK III
Give Up the Ghost
March 1877
CHAPTER ONE
Did he lie? does he laugh? does he know it,
Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,
Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,
Sin’s child by incestuous death?
SNOW WHIRLED DOWN out of the gray sky, and the young woman who was crouched behind the big letters of the ENO’S FRUIT SALT sign high over Tudor Street pressed her back against the warm chimney bricks and began the song once again, singing loudly against the wind:
It occurred to her that she was in her own garden of snow up here, with rounded white drifts at various levels all around her, and icicles fringing roof edges and the projecting rims of cold chimneys.
The metal pattens on her boots were braced against the shingled roof of a tiny gable that poked out of the main slanting roof, and she wondered if anyone within might hear her; but the window would certainly be closed in this weather, and the little garret room probably wasn’t heated — the chimney at her back wasn’t radiating warmth from any hearth within a dozen vertical yards. She felt as if she were on the lowest-hanging skirt of some slow-moving airship, hidden by the snow and the fog from the earthbound city so far below.