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, 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.”

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.

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.

15 September

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.

THE HOSPITAL, CALLED ST. JOHN’S OF JERUSALEM, was a Byzantine affair, and I was happy we did not have to walk its halls. I could hear the pained moaning well enough from its windows and pitied the penniless men and women who were forced to convalesce there. Alain kept watch near the carriage, fidgeting nervously in his auburn suit while I approached the ancient gate of the adjoining burial yard and attempted conversation with the gravedigger, a tall man with a sandy face who sat smoking a reed pipe on one of the larger stones. The rusted metal of the gate peeled away like tree bark beneath my fingers, and the digger took his own time answering my inquiries. He said the men who filched the yard weren’t called bodysnatchers; they’d been dubbed Resurrection Men.

“Like Christ himself?” I asked, not without humor.

“Doctors must have somethin’ to study upon, ma’am,” he continued. “Fresh bodies are hard to come by these days. Sometimes, if they are not given readily, they must be taken. We never use stolen goods here at St. John’s though. You can tell your ladies at the garden society that.” And from this protestation, I realized that St. John’s was quite likely mining its own fresh graves. The digger was not a digger at all but a Resurrection Man. He went on to tell me that sometimes these Resurrection Men were also interested in fully decomposed bodies that were no longer wearing their flesh. “These,” he said, “are sold to country churches desperate for bones to fill their reliquaries. Imagine the jaw of some John Doe being touted as a vestige of John the Baptist—only nobody better ask about his gold tooth.” He laughed, and I excused myself quickly thereafter, marking my map as I walked.

Our hired carriage carried us further into Cripplesgate, and I began to count the small cemeteries that could be seen from the street, stopping when I’d reached twenty. How could there be so many? The poor were prone to death, but also apparently prone to exhibiting that mortality. There seemed a graveyard on every block. And all the while, Alain recounted the details of a party he’d attended thrown by a countess. Apparently cave-aged cheese had been served.

I happened to catch sight of what may have been a woman or a young boy standing at the fence of one narrow, desolate yard. The urchin’s gender was obscure because the figure’s hair had been tonsured as is often done in preparation for the receiving of some religious rite. More than that, the clothes were not clothes precisely, but what I can only describe as a colorless shroud. When the creature saw my face, it put its hands on the bars of the graveyard fence and watched intensely. I tapped on the carriage ceiling, indicating that the driver should stop. I refused to listen to Alain’s complaints as I hurried across the street to the fence. The closer I came to the poor wretch, the more its gender seemed to dissolve until I was looking at nothing more than a mask with the semblance of features hovering above a fluttering drape. It was a human face, yes, but somehow like the lower animals, too. The creature had pressed its body against the railing and seemed to require my help. Perhaps it had been hurt and was searching for kindness. “My dear,” I whispered to it. “My dear, shall I let you out of there? There must be a gate ’round the other side.” But Alain was already at my back, pulling me. “Miriam, hurry. Don’t be foolish. We’re in Cripplesgate, for God’s sake.” He was looking at the creature behind the fence in horror. I found myself unable to glance back as he rushed me toward the carriage. I did not want to see how the poor thing would watch us go.

Inside the safety of our vehicle, Alain was unable to control the features of his normally composed and handsome face. His full set of teeth shown in his mouth. His eyes were half-sunk into his head, and I could see the shape of his skull beneath his skin. “What were you thinking? ” he whispered, as the carriage bucked to a start.

“I wanted to see if that child needed my assistance,” I replied.

“Child? ” he said. “Miriam, that was not a child. It was a lunatic of some variety I have never encountered before. This is the last time. Truly the last. I’m finished.”

I tried to take Alain’s hand and felt his pulse clanging in his wrist. “I’m sorry, dear. Sorry for frightening you,” I said.

“Aren’t you ever frightened?” he asked, pulling away from me. “Don’t you have that capacity?”

19 September

I INTENDED TO BEGIN MY SURVEY of the plague pits today, many of which remain unmarked and date far back into our city’s history. It is possible to locate such pits by doing careful research and speaking with the locals of various unpleasant neighborhoods. Bones, buried quite near the surface, are often unearthed by some interested dog. The plague pits inhabit enormous tracts of land—famous examples being Black Ditch and the Pardoner’s Yard. There is a deep history of such pits going back to the first iteration of the plague in 658 when the Saxons perished by the thousands. I knew Mrs. Hill would be pleased if I located a few of the pits because a plaque could be erected. Also, such a difficult endeavor might take my mind temporarily off Alain. He had not made contact after the events in Cripplesgate, and could I truly blame him?

In the end, I did not go out. I sat in my parlor with the drapes shut tight, and thought about the figure at the fence. Who had it been or what? I tried to sketch it on a piece of paper but ended up tearing a hole in the sheet. A theory, known as Animism, had been recently put forth by spiritualists who believed that objects possess their own kind of life and, hence, volition. I wondered if what we’d seen had not been a person at all, but some piece of the burial yard itself, stepping forth to investigate me, the investigator. Perhaps I was not mother of the dead, but mother of the yards—the grass and the stone, coffin wood and statuary. I tried to put the thought aside as foolishness. The graveyards were not my children, and I was not their surrogate. What would Alain make of such considerations?

5 October

THIS EVENING I WITNESSED a torchlit night funeral of the sort still customary for suicides. Very few parishioners were in attendance. I did not go to the grave of the girl (for it was a girl who had taken her life), but rather sat on a marble bench and watched the procession. Her coffin came on a humble haymaker’s cart decked with dyed ostrich plumes. A man played a dirge on a flute and another carried a portrait draped in black muslin. The face in the painting, presumably the girl’s, was surprisingly like the face of the urchin I’d seen in Cripplesgate. It was a poorly executed likeness, an oversimplification of features done in oil, and yet it seemed to reach out to me—yet another object possessed with life. Animism again? I considered what it meant that suicides must be buried under cover of night, such a thing seemed foolish and cruel. Lines of poetry I’d memorized in childhood returned: When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. And he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun. And what were the stars but bright gas and rock—monuments dangling from the firmament? I raised my head and tried to remember a prayer to say for the girl.

12 October

THIS EVENING I PUT ON my warmest cape and hood and ventured out to investigate one of the only private burial yards in the city. Such yards were outlawed early on in our history due to their tendency to spread bubonic plague. I’d come across information concerning the private yard by way of a Quaker woman who’d served as nanny to the daughter of the Earl of Dartmouth. The daughter had fallen on hard times and the Quaker had been dismissed from her position—the Earl blaming her for his daughter’s misfortunes. I believe the Quaker felt vindicated in revealing the Earl’s private yard to me, also whispering there was a rumor circulating that the ground was still accepting fresh bodies—a highly illegal act according to city ordinance.

I’d given up on the idea of asking permission to view the yard, as I was sure I’d be refused. Instead, I decided to visit the Earl of Dartmouth’s property under the cover of night. It was only when I passed through his thankfully unlocked back gate that I realized there was some sort of celebration going on at the stone manor house which sat high on an ivied hill. Chinese lanterns spilled red light from the back veranda, and the chatter of guests came to me on the cold evening breeze. I did not concern myself with the social event, as my business was with the burial site, which appeared to be an ample distance from the party so that no one would notice or bother my investigation.

The small gated yard contained a sepulcher braced by an iron latticework and topped with a weather-stained angel. Two funerary urns sat on either side of the narrow door. There were no markers or plaques, only the bone-white house and its silent seraphim. I took out my map and pencil, making careful note of the yard’s distance from Dartmouth manor, and it was then that I heard the sound—the faint and glittering series of chords, rising and falling, not like an ocean this time, but a secret pond in far-off woods. The music came not from the party but from the earth. I did not trust my ears. Could it be that I had not imagined the song of the dead in Gramercy Park? Once again I found my edges dissolving, and I lowered my body toward the earth.

I could not help myself from forcing my fingers into the dirt, pulling back first the layer of grass and then the soil, finally digging with both hands until, not more than a few feet beneath the surface, I came into contact with the lid of a box. It was a decorative piece—the sort of container a dowry is often kept in. Bright tulips had been painted on the lid, and it had clearly not been made for burial, but to sit proudly on some girl’s shelf. As I pulled the box from the earth, the music intensified and grew more beautiful—full of longing. Without thinking I unfastened the latch, opening the box and throwing back the lid. There, a small body lay in a partial state of decomposition, the whole of it resting on a silver hand-stitched pillow. The singing—which had once again enfolded me inside its dream—told me that the little fellow was not restful, had not been respected. And just as I was about to close the lid and take the poor dear with me to find some minister who might properly inter him, I heard voices from the veranda, a cheerful laughter that floated down the hill. The voices of a man and a woman eclipsed the song of the dead child, growing louder and louder until the pair was standing at the gate to the private yard. It was Alain in a dapper suit and a young girl wearing a bow in her hair. What horror did I feel in seeing him? I was still half-dissolved by the music, my hair hanging down. My hands were covered in soil, my dress streaked in grass. When the girl saw what I had pulled from the earth, she put her small hand to her mouth, forcing her fingers tight against her lips and began backing away, eyes shining with terror until she broke into a run. And Alain was left staring through the bars of the fence. Face as white as ivory. He was statue. No, a child’s plaything.

“You have to help,” I said, gesturing at the dowry box. “This body needs us.”

He held his hand to his chest, sinking slowly against the gate, eyes of stone, flesh of stone. For him, I was not a woman haunted by spirits of the yard; I was the thing that haunts—that which lingers along winding paths and in the shadows of monuments. I could not bear for him to see me like that. I wanted life, yet death wanted me more. I gathered the box and lid into my arms and hurried from the yard, leaving Alain forever this time.

I SIT IN MY PARLOR, the dowry box near my chair. I’ve gone through the Times twice searching for listings of infant mortality. There is nothing. No record of the dear’s existence. It is difficult to concentrate. I can hear the yards—from Clerkenwell to Cripplesgate—a longing body made of loving sound. Victoria and her London are but a brittle boat of dreams floating on that dark, luxurious ocean. I lay my head against one velvet wing of my chair. I feel myself diving beneath the cold waves—so perfectly submerged. Fantastically alive.