Free Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers Page A

not been in the story as she had originally written it.
    When she finished reading the page, she stepped to the desk and slapped around among the long galley proof sheets, for the handwritten page ended in midsentence—there was, though, no subsequent page.
    But she needed to find out how the scene ended. Gabriel needed to know.
    I could sit down and hold a pen over a blank sheet, she thought, and open my mind to him, deliberately this time, instead of inadvertently. He could write another page, or several.
    All at once her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Yes, she thought excitedly, I’ll give him my hand, let him in just to that extent, just for a little while…
    Then she clutched the crucifix on the rope around her waist, and for a moment she wished she were Catholic instead of Anglican, and that the rope was a rosary, so that she could pray to the Virgin for help—for she had sensed that her sinful eagerness was reciprocated from some direction, requited. She couldn’t say an Our Father right now—ever since the age of fourteen she had instinctively feared the all-seeing God of the Old Testament—and even Christ would not shelter a soul who couldn’t bear to entirely relinquish its one most precious sin … but the Virgin Mary might understand…
    She shook off the thought—heretical Papist superstition!—and tore the handwritten page into strips and then into tiny fragments and tossed them into the cold fireplace.
    She gathered the galley proofs into a stack, the corrected pages facedown on top of the uncorrected ones, then folded the stack and tucked it into the valise beside the desk. She would have to get another of the sisters to assume her duties today and find someone to take the last few days of her scheduled residence—but she needed to see Gabriel immediately.
    She glanced at the closet where her street clothes were hung, then impatiently shook her head. There wasn’t time. She hefted the valise, opened the door, and her heels echoed in the empty dormitory as she hurried past the rows of empty beds on her way out to the carriage lane by the stables.
    IN THE WEST END , northwest of Waterloo Bridge and the open market at Covent Garden, seven narrow streets met from all directions in a confusion of carriages and wagons and omnibuses below the wedge-shaped buildings that framed an irregular open space. Earl Street stretched east and west, and its balconies and awnings and the hats of the pedestrians on the pavement were lit with the morning sun, while only the chimney pots and roofs of the other streets stood free of the chilly shadows that made the old women around the bakery shops below pull their shawls more tightly around their shoulders. A smoky beam of sunlight crossed the crowded square, occasionally reaching through gaps in the traffic to touch the stone circle where there had once stood a pillar with six sundials on it. The junction had long been known as Seven Dials, for the streets and buildings themselves were said to make a seventh sundial for those who could read it.
    Through the crowds of cartwheeling children and adolescent thieves in corduroy trousers and black caps, a peculiar couple shuffled to a corner on the west side. Though the man’s hair and beard were gray as ashes, his shoulders were broad under his flannel coat, and his step was springy—but when his dwarfish companion hesitated at a wide curbside puddle, he crouched and braced himself and lifted it with both hands, then shuffled carefully through the puddle to put the burden down on the pavement with a whoosh of exhaled steam.
    The little person was draped in a voluminous Chesterfield overcoat and a baggy slouch hat, with a scarf wrapped around its neck and face, and though now it hopped out of the way of a couple of sprinting boys, its eyes weren’t visible. Long shirtsleeves covered its hands, but in its right hand, half hidden behind the curtain of a lapel, it