This New & Poisonous Air

by Adam McOmber

  I turned to look at the crate again. It danced with shadows in the firelight, and I could indeed imagine all their ghosts crouched inside, attached to the Burning Armor, dragged by it through history. “Yes,” I said. “You were right to buy it, and I thank you for the stories.” He nodded in a gentleman’s way, and because I knew he wanted nothing more from me, I clutched the empty book beneath my coat, shored myself against the cold and made my way toward the foyer and the snowy night. But I found I could not leave in that manner, knowing I might never encounter Lord Weymouth again, so I turned back and saw that he’d slouched in his chair, believing our scene complete. “Thomas,” I said, “I want you to know that there was never a problem between us—even when we argued, even when I left you, it was all part of the good.”

  He attempted a smile, an air of levity, but could not raise himself from the chair. “We walked together didn’t we, Kenton? For as long as two men could.”

  I don’t remember leaving Longleat that night—returning to my carriage, traveling down busy streets of Christmas Eve revelers and finally recovering my wife. I must have done these things—yet it seems to me, in fact, I walked through a forest of long ago with the sun warming my skin, making me feel as if I were made of wonderful fire, a tilted cross carved upon the plating at my chest. I could hear singing. And yes, I was surprised to realize it issued from my very own astonished throat.

  Beneath Us

  12 August 18—

  FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR, I stood at the locked and painted gate of an unmarked graveyard, watching spotted hens and ducks of some ancient variety pick their way between fallen headstones. I’d slipped half inside a dream, charmed by the birds. They were black-eyed and mute, moving gently across the grass, sometimes grouping in the shade of a worn monument or at the perimeter of the fence.

  Children had thrown clods of dirt at me earlier in the day for trespassing in what I believed to be a graveyard but turned out to be their mother’s washing yard. I wanted to explain that I was an official, an emissary of the Queen, yet they were so angry and chiding, I could not speak. They believed perhaps I was the embodiment of some cruel woman they’d heard about in a fairy tale. My book and my dark dress, the creases around my mouth and eyes—all of this betrayed me. When had I become such a distasteful creature? Over what line had I stepped?

  It was pleasant to simply take leisure with the ducks and hens, where I knew I would not be attacked. Apparently, this yard had been turned into an aviary years ago by some urban peasant, and I thought the dead should like to watch the comings and goings of animals, as I myself have often preferred the lower beasts to their supposedly evolved counterparts.

  It is the will of the Metropolitan Gardens Association, my new employer, that all such consecrated grounds should be located, labeled, and preserved. Mrs. Octavia Hill, head of the board and fierce proponent of urban renewal, imagines these yards transformed into what she calls “outdoor sitting rooms,” and the notion conjures curious pictures: a sofa of dewy lichen, a hearth that burns with untended violets. The difficultly is that the yards themselves have floated free from the churches and institutions to which they were once tethered; fires and the shifting tides of urbanization have razed those structures, yet the graves remain.

  Before my deployment, Mrs. Hill, with the high and regal voice of a clarion, provided a collection of cautionary tales—hidden graveyards destroyed by property-hungry industrialists during the boom. Carbolic acid was used in many cases to dissolve the bones so no record of exhumation remained. “We must mark these grounds,” she said. “Save the dead and save ourselves, Miriam. And it’s women like you—childless and without other occupation who shall lead the way. You will become mother to our ancestors and therefore mother to us all.”

  And so I persist in my survey, mothering and dreaming, carrying the accordion-style grid map provided to me by the board and labeling it carefully as I have been hired to do. And I am thankful. Mrs. Hill is correct; women like me—nearly forty and without husband or station—are rarely allowed such new beginnings.

  20 August

  THE HEAT WAS LIKE A CEILING on Staining Street, and I struggled to remain upright. My newfound friend, Alain de la Tour, did not fair as well. He collapsed dramatically in the shade of a poplar tree, pale and dripping in his fashionable suit. Hand at his chest, he moaned comically, “Miriam. Oh, Miriam.” He suffered from palpitations, and I told him that if he could not keep up with a rheumatic woman, he was clearly not taking enough morning exercise. He waved a porcelain hand, telling me the French did not exercise as the English. It was crass to even mention such a thing. “And you, my dear, are not as rheumatic as you seem to think.”

  I’d made his acquaintance at one of the new coffee palaces that have sprung up in the city’s finer neighborhoods—glowing bargelike buildings full of girls in hats who believe they are made beautiful by lantern light. M. de la Tour approached my table in all his threadbare regality, and after a brief introduction, explained that he had arrived in London to make himself known to society, believing it would bring him either fame or wealth. Despite my wish to hurriedly dismiss him, I found that he possessed a magnetism—not animal but mineral, glittering like a sulfide extracted from the earth. A pyrite, lovely despite the fact that it played at being gold. He admired my map, asking if I were planning an invasion of some kind. When I explained my appointment at the Gardens Association, his polished eyes widened. My dress, he said, was not unlike Ruskin’s storm cloud—a wind of darkness and my hair was a fall of ashes. Even at a distance I had appeared macabre.

  “Is that flattery or insult?” I asked.

  He ignored my question, sitting at my table without invitation and nearly spilling my demitasse. “I would like to take you to a party—a celebration of Regent’s day,” he said. “I am in need of a lady, and you are clearly in need of cheer.”

  I laughed politely. I had not attended a party since I was quite young and did not intend to take up the habit again. Even as I refused, I found myself wishing I was the kind of woman who could go to a party—not an actual English gala of course—which would certainly be of the same dull breed I remembered. No, I would have liked to attend the party the young man was imagining. Society as conjured by Alain de la Tour. I studied his poorly cut hair and provincial nose, features that seemed to indicate a lonely but hopeful mind, and I wondered what sort of place he’d come from. Certainly not a city. Alain only pretended at sophistication. A small village was more like it; something near the water with stony beaches.

  I COVERED MY MOUTH AND NOSE with my shawl to prevent the smell of the nearby meat packing house from making me ill. Alain had tied a red silk handkerchief over his face and looked like a petite outlaw of the American West. As we walked, I related a story I’d been told during an interview with the abbess of St. Benet Sherehog. A gravedigger and his young apprentice had recently expired from bad air after climbing into an open pit grave of the sort still used in some of the country yards. “Bodies are wrapped in rugs or cloth,” I said, “and with little ceremony they are dropped into the pit, jumbled together and sprinkled with lime until the space is full. Terrible gases are released from the corpses—what the diggers call ‘poisonous air’.” Alain reacted with picturesque disgust, asking why the diggers had gone down into the grave to begin with.

  “To steal, most likely,” I said. “People will brave poison for money these days. And it is exactly such mistreatment of the dead that I am working to prevent.”

  He swore an oath and said that in his country, the dead were respected. Cities were built to hold them—rows of grandiloquent tombs that verged on the Egyptian. “There are fog-laden boulevards” he continued, “and reflecting pools. Music is played and tragic tableaux enacted on stages by youths dressed in crepe.” I had seen sketches of French cemeteries, of course, and knew they were similar to our English yards. Père-Lachaise was lovely but in a completely natural way. I was pleased though to hear Alain tell his stories. The right sort
of lie, I found, could serve better than the truth.

  The abbess of St. Benet Sherehog who’d directed me to Staining Street said she believed there had once been a church in the area attached to a burial yard. The church had burned (as did many of the churches) in the great fire of 1701, leaving the yard and its few monuments adrift. Houses had grown up around the yard, perhaps even over the top of it, though I hoped that was not the case.

  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.”

  29 August

  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.

  1 September

  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, onl
y 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.”

  7 September

  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.