Hide Me Among the Graves Read Online Free PDF Page B

came pushing back in through the door carrying a tray, and as he set it on the table he said, “And what ails your bird, Miss…?”
    â€œMcKee,” she said. “Adelaide McKee.” He had poured steaming tea into a cup, and she accepted it with a nod, ignoring the pots of sugar and milk. “Who is Mister C.V.S.? I didn’t notice the sign the last time I was here.”
    â€œMister…? Oh! That’s me, I suppose. The whole thing stands for Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.” He pulled up one of the wooden chairs and sat down across the table from her. “You’ve been here before? Was it another case of bird malaise?”
    â€œI gave you a different name then.” She untied the strings of her bonnet and pulled it off, shaking out her shoulder-length chestnut curls. “And it was seven years ago.” She glanced around the room. “Frankly, I’m surprised to find you still here.”
    Crawford had poured himself a cup too, and started to raise it, but now he clanked it back down onto the saucer. His face was chilly with a sudden dew of sweat, and two full seconds later his ribs and the backs of his hands tingled with remembered fright and enormous present embarrassment.
    HE HAD STILL BEEN drunk most of the time in that summer of 1855, and on many nights memories of his wife and two sons had kept him from sleeping; on those nights he had sat up drinking and trying to lose himself in cheap novels or, giving up on that, gone for long walks along the banks of the Thames.
    And on one such rainy summer midnight, he had found himself drawn toward the lights along the south shore of the river—but when he had paid his ha’penny at the Strand-side turnstile of Waterloo Bridge and walked out as far as a recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge’s nine arches over the river, he stopped there with such deliberateness that he wondered for a moment if he had had some now-forgotten purpose in coming out here.
    There were no lamps on the bridge, and he had been able dimly to see the silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral a mile away to the east, and strings of yellow and orange lights on the south shore flickering through the veils of rain. Occasional patches of moonlight shone on the rain-dulled water below him.
    His wife and sons had died on the Thames two years earlier, in a boating accident, and he wondered, with some alarm, if his purpose in coming out here had been to throw himself into that same water, perhaps maudlinly inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem about a prostitute who had committed suicide off this bridge.
    His wife’s name had been Veronica. His sons had been Girard and Richard. He stood there for several minutes, while rain washed away the tears on his cheeks, and told himself, They’re gone. They’re gone.
    Over the hiss of the rain and the constant hoarse whisper of the river shifting around the bridge pilings below, he became aware of a metronomic clinking getting louder. A woman was walking toward him from the Blackfriars side of the bridge, and she evidently had metal pattens on her shoes to protect them from puddles. The round bulge at the top of her silhouette was certainly an umbrella. Embarrassed at being caught weeping, even though it would not be evident, Crawford straightened and wearily got ready to lift his hat as she passed him.
    His hand was on the brim of his bowler hat, and the silhouette of the umbrella became wider as she presumably glanced toward him—
    â€”And then for a frozen instant it seemed that a piece of the umbrella broke free and hung in the night air, swelling rapidly in size—
    But it was something rushing down at the two of them out of the charcoal sky, something alive and churning and savage, and at the sudden roaring of it the woman glanced up and then leaped backward, colliding with Crawford and spinning him half around.
    The harsh bass noise of the thing was like a