This New and Poisonous Air (11 page)

I was admitted to the home of Mrs. Rayner Beloc, a quiet widow who, according to the knotted appearance of her hands, had lived a life of work. I left Alain on the street knowing that his extravagant nature might disturb her. Mrs. Beloc told me she’d lived in the same rooms for nearly fifty years and took her time before indicating that she was familiar with the burial yard I spoke of. In the heat
of her cramped, spare parlor, she served cups of steaming Darjeeling, and we sat chatting near a soot-streaked window until finally, after she’d reminisced at some length about her husband who’d worked at the meatpacking plant, she pointed through the dirty portal, saying, “There is the yard you’re looking for, Missus Isadore.”

Below us, hemmed in by houses, was a square patch of ground growing not only tangled grass but tombstones.

“That’s what’s left of it, at least,” said Mrs. Beloc. “I’ve known it was a churchyard for as long as I’ve lived in this house—anyone can see the white stones. How many of them do you count, Missus?” I was unsure of their number because of the poor visibility but thought I could make out eleven pale posts leaning in various directions.

Mrs. Beloc nodded. “That’s what I used to think. But then I saw the twelfth, lying there at the northern end. Uprooted.”

I leaned closer to the window and realized that Mrs. Beloc was correct. A twelfth headstone had fallen on its side in the late summer grass. “May we go down and visit the yard?” I asked.

“I’ve made attempts to do just that,” Mrs. Beloc said. “Looks like it might be a peaceful place for a walk, doesn’t it? When I was younger, I was want to do many such things. It would have been nice to walk there with my husband and read the names on those stones. But no matter how many doors I knocked upon, nor how many alleys I walked to their end, I could not find an entrance to that little yard. It’s my belief there is no entrance, Missus. It can only be seen from windows. Perhaps it can only be seen from
my
window.”

I put my tea cup carefully in its saucer, looking into Mrs. Beloc’s deep-set eyes. “There must be some way, dear. It can’t be entirely contained.”

“My neighbors are kind hearts,” she said. “All you need do is knock and they will show you there are no doors.”

I did knock, and though I can’t say I found all of Mrs. Beloc’s neighbors to be the kindest of hearts, most did allow me into their homes long enough to discern that there was indeed no entrance to the small churchyard that the abbess of Saint Benet Sherehog had described to me.

“How can this be, Miriam?” Alain asked at the end of our search.

I shook my head. “Perhaps, in this case, the dead have decided to protect themselves.”

TODAY, I VISITED the newly opened catacombs of St. Michael’s cathedral on the arm of Alain de la Tour. He arrived at my rooms in a hired carriage with a charming yellow pansy in his lapel. We must have made an odd pair. I’m sure some of the women assumed I was his mother or a dowager aunt. At any rate, the crypt of St. Michaels, as advertised in the
Times
, had been refurbished and made into, of all things, a tearoom—and it was a truly astonishing space. A year before, the crypt was a festering tomb full of caskets, but it has been fastidiously cleaned and lit with gas lamps. Tea was served on lacquered tables and taffeta floated between the columns like aubergine clouds. Women of society promenaded through the catacombs as if in some quiet park on a sunless day, and I heard two of them remarking on the handsomeness of a medieval knight engraved upon the wall. Alain thought the whole thing ridiculous. “Have these people nothing better to do than wallow in their cult of death? ” he whispered.

“It does seem a bit odd, doesn’t it? ” I replied, sipping my tea.

“More than odd,” Alan said, dabbing sweat from his brow with a napkin. “If you wade too far into this black ocean, Miriam, you’ll soon be swept away.”

I told him I was not as morbid as he seemed to think. Most of my interests were quite normal: theater, novels, gardening and the like, which is how I’d become involved with the Metropolitan Gardens Association to begin with. I did, however, recall for him that as a child I’d witnessed a production of
Romeo and Juliet
in Regent’s Park and had become rather fixated on the final set—Juliet’s tomb, where the heroine lay in a magical state of both death and life. The players decorated the set beautifully with an ivy that nearly consumed the stage; twinkling lamps shone from between the leaves. How that place must have smelled to Romeo—not of decay but of vertiginous life with a tincture of apothecarean poison. “I pretended that my girlhood room was the tomb of Juliet,” I said, “and I waited there for Romeo—not to kiss me back to life as does the dull prince in
Sleeping Beauty
, but to kiss me deeper into death.”

Alain finished his tea in one gulp, leaned across the table, and kissed me brightly on the cheek. A fierce blush overtook me and I glanced around the crypt to see if anyone were watching. “This does not disprove my theory that you’re a strange one, by the way, Miriam,” he said. “Deeper into death? Come now.”

I cleared my throat. “As I said, I was young, and Shakespeare can be quite romantic.”

Alain grinned. “Your Shakespeare, too, is dead.”

“The rose of yore is but a name,” I quoted, and we stood to leave that place and return to the street above.

I’M AFRAID ALAIN AND I HAVE ARGUED. It would be more fitting for me to write about the burial yards I have visited since my last entry, but I cannot think of them. I can only turn our disagreement over like a problem, though no solution presents itself. We’d taken a small boat to a lake-bound island called Curston’s Stand where I’d heard there might be a lost burial yard. I’d received a message from Octavia Hill, asking if I could please hurry my work along, as she wanted to present my findings to next month’s meeting of the board. She needed statistics—unmarked yards in danger of dissolution. I replied carefully to her note, saying that the more yards I plotted on the map, the more seemed to present themselves to me. I feared that soon I would have made one black mark over all of London.

The sun shone through a dolorous ceiling of clouds, coloring the day in a minor key. Alain was distracted as he paddled. Several times his hand went to his chest, and a look of concern shaded his features. I asked whether he was having palpitations as he had on Staining Street, and this question seemed to irritate him. He claimed there was nothing wrong that some common rest wouldn’t cure and reminded me that he’d stayed out late the night before—an event to celebrate Empire Days, which I’d refused to attend—and now once again, here he was prancing about in search of the dead. “Anyone would be tired with a schedule such as this, Miriam. Anyone.”

“You don’t need to raise your voice,” I said flatly. “And you don’t
need
to join me on these excursions, you know.”

“I suppose I don’t,” was his terse response. Then after a pause, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I asked. “We’ve only spoken the truth.”

“You are crying, Miriam,” he said.

I touched my cheek and found it wet. Having no notion of my emotional state disturbed me. Had I really grown so disconnected? As a younger woman, I’d allowed myself release, but in later years I’d become embarrassed by such things, the way that people looked at me, and worked to make them disappear. Primitive cultures called such a thing, “losing one’s soul.” Was I now nothing more than a shell that dragged itself along, a body ready for the grave? I turned from Alain to study a line of black ducks swimming near the shifting trees on the far shore. In the end, we found no graves on Curston’s Stand, only the remnants of a picnic and an animal in such a state of decomposition that we could no longer tell its kind.

“I must be honest with you, Miriam,” Alain said, standing by our little boat, leaning on the oar. “I no longer want to come on these ventures with you. Please don’t be hurt.”

I folded my hands and said of course I understood. “Have you met someone new? ” I asked. “At Empire Days? ”

“I have met many people,” he said.

“And you prefer them to me?”

He shook his head. “I prefer them to death.”

GRAMERCY PARK: DAY DARK AND WINDBLOWN. Nearthe pond, children played a game of Who Killed Cock Robin, and fragments of their chant drifted to me:
Who saw him die? I, said the Fly. Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish.
I’d brought an umbrella in case of rain, but no storm presented itself.
A single column of smoke had risen from a public fire fit for a Guy Fawkes celebration, making the sun look pale, as if it had emerged from beneath the sea. I went to the park alone. Alain and I had not spoken for nearly a week. Twice, I’d almost written to him, wanting to say that I’d imagined a home in the country—rolling hills of heather with not a graveyard in sight. But the embarrassment was too much. Whoever had invented love and marriage was dead now, too, and I was glad for that.

The men from Oxford, three of them in coats and fluttering ties, greeted me cordially before handing me off to a student. I was, after all, not a scientist but a mapmaker from the Gardens Association, and my quiet participation in urban reform meant little to them. At a portable table, the student showed me the items excavated from the hill: a spearhead, a broken coin, and a few fragments of bone. The theory was that the hill had served as an ancient burial mound for high-ranking Roman soldiers, though the Oxford men were perplexed as to why the soldiers had been buried
inside
the perimeter of the Roman wall. “If this is truly what it appears,” the student said, “there could be thousands of such undiscovered plots all over the city, ma’am. The souls of Romans, spread everywhere about.” He chuckled. “I hope you’re not the type to have nightmares.”

I assured him I was not and wanted to tell him of my own research but decided against it. The boy looked rather susceptible to nightmares himself. Instead, I asked for a closer look at the excavation, and he led me to the channel cut into the hill—a kind of low hallway with wooden braces to hold back the dirt, then he, too, excused himself. I was momentarily alone with the Romans, and I stepped across the line of rope, slipping into the passage and lifting my skirts to avoid dragging them in the mud.
From the tunnel, the park and sky were no longer visible, and I put my face close to the wall to look for some yet undiscovered artifact. The blunt smell of the earth filled my nose, and I could see nothing but shining bits of black rock and debris. The coolness was pleasant, conjuring enclosures from childhood: a hollow tree, my mother’s dressing room. But then I began to feel claustrophobic, as though I was trapped in the hill—entombed. Nearly panicking, my lungs straining for air, I slipped and fell against one of the wooden braces, and it was then that I heard a quiet echo, like music that seemed to rise from the dirt itself. At first, I told myself the sound must be reverberation from some distant bandstand in Gramercy Park, yet the music seemed to grow louder, drawing me closer to the wall. Was there singing too? I believed there was. And those voices soothed my nerves, helped my body to relax. The edges of my form began to dissolve in the darkness of the hill. How many times had I heard death named a dreamless condition, yet ensconced within the mound, I realized that perhaps the dead
do
dream. This might very well be the music of their reverie, and listening to it made me feel a citizen of some other country. I dropped the hem of my dress, lowering my body against the inner belly of the hill. I held the dirt. For a moment, forgetting Alain and the attentions he’d paid to me.

THE SONG IN THE HILL—I am beginning to think it was mere delirium. Perhaps lack of oxygen or some freshly opened subterranean gas fissure caused the hallucination, though I can still remember the tune carried by those voices—rising and falling like waves—and I hum it under
my breath at times. After the events in Gramercy Park, I grew weak with sadness. Terse letters from Octavia Hill arrived daily asking about the status of my research, but I could not respond. I felt I’d lost Alain and at the same time had become separated from my project. I was neither a scientist from Oxford nor a mystic who could commune with the dead. What was the point of my searching out graveyards? What good would my findings do in the end? Perhaps Alain was right. I’d spent my whole life afraid of the living, and now, via Octavia Hill and her reform movement, I’d found a silly reason to further remove myself from that world.

But that melancholy curtain seems to have risen, and I am once again ready to perform my duties. I sent word to Ms. Hill that my research was nearly complete, though I confess that was partially a confabulation, as I am not sure when I could actually call the work finished. I affixed my Gardens Association badge to my shawl and took up my map this morning with new resolve—fortified too by the return of Alain. I’d cleverly sent word of my intention to travel to Cripplesgate for an investigation of a possible occurrence of bodysnatching at a hospital yard, and he returned with a succinct note:
Miriam, you are a complete fool if you think I would let you go there alone. Be ready at eleven.
I knew, of course, that he would insist on protecting me, though Alain is something of a dollish man, and I worry that he might, in fact, draw the wrong sort of attention.