Free Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers Page B

gripped a violin with a bow clipped to the neck.
    Now with its sleeve-shrouded left hand the little figure plucked the bow free, and raised the violin and tucked the chin rest into its scarf and skated the bow over the strings—the hidden fingers of its right hand slid up and down the neck, and the instrument produced a hoarse seesawing note.
    The gray-haired man nodded impatiently. “What does it look like?” he snapped. His lip was curled into a perpetual sneer by a scar that ran down his jaw.
    He was squinting around at the people hurrying past or slouched against the buildings, and at last he saw the person he was looking for—an old man in a floppy hat and a formal but tattered black coat on the far side of Monmouth Street, his gloved hands holding a broom as if it were a drum major’s baton.
    â€œThis way,” said the gray-haired man, starting forward.
    The violin emitted a downward-sliding note, but the little person holding it scuttled along after him.
    At the corner the old man with the broom had stepped out onto the crushed gravel of the street, waving his broom to halt the horses of an approaching beer wagon, and then he proceeded to sweep the slushy top layer of gravel aside so that three businessmen in bowler hats could cross the street without getting their shoes too muddy. On the far side they paused to give him money, and then, visibly surprised, paused for a little longer while the old man reached into a pocket and gave them change.
    He dodged and splashed his way back to the corner where the mismatched couple waited, and he didn’t look at the short figure but grinned at the gray-bearded man.
    â€œStepping out, Mr. Trelawny?” he said.
    Trelawny nodded and handed him a gold sovereign. “I want it all back,” he said.
    The crossing sweeper nodded judiciously as if this was an uncommon but not unheard-of transaction, and from his pocket produced two ten-shilling pieces. “There you go, a pound for a pound. I’ll just switch brooms.”
    He hobbled to a nearby druggist’s shop with red and purple glass jars in the window; a boy crouched in the recessed entryway beside another broom, and the old man took it and left the one he’d been using.
    â€œA new broom sweeps clean,” said Trelawny dutifully when the old fellow had returned.
    â€œBut the old broom knows all the coroners,” returned the old crossing sweeper with a cackle.
    Trelawny’s scarred lip kinked in a tired smile at the exchange.
    Trelawny glanced left and right at the coaches rattling past on the street, then suddenly darted out in the wake of a fast-moving hansom cab. The old crossing sweeper followed him nimbly, sweeping Trelawny’s boot prints out of the wet road surface.
    On the pavement behind them, the dwarf in the slouch hat and overcoat swiveled its covered head in all directions and sawed shrill notes on the violin.
    On the far side of the street, Trelawny looked back and couldn’t even see his diminutive onetime companion.
    â€œWell done,” he said to the old man. “You … don’t get into trouble over this?”
    The crossing sweeper laughed. “I may be a prodigal son, but I’m still a son. And how should I refuse crossing to,” he added, pointing at his own throat and then at Trelawny’s, “the bridge himself?”
    Trelawny pursed his lips irritably at the reminder, but he nodded and hurried away up Queen Street, the narrowest of the streets that met at the Seven Dials.
    He remembered this area of the City as it had been in the late 1830s, before the track for New Oxford Street had been leveled through the tangled courts and densely packed houses of the St. Giles rookery. He smiled and softly hummed an old song as he hurried along the crowded pavement, thinking of streets and houses that were just memories now—Carrier Street, with Mother Dowling’s undiscriminating lodging house… Buckeridge Street,