Hide Me Among the Graves Read Free Page A

again, and she lay down and snuggled herself under the blankets, hopeful that she had banished the old nightmares and would instead dream of the man she would one day marry.
    AT FIRST THE FIGURE seemed to be Mouth Boy after all, for the thing’s lips were grossly swollen, as if from an injury—in the dream it limped from darkness into the ring of light below a streetlamp—but when she focused more closely, she saw that the effect must have been a momentary exaggeration of the shadows, for its lips were simply wide and prominent below a pug nose and two enormous eyes. Its hair was an untidy tangle, and somehow it seemed to bear a caricature resemblance to her brother Gabriel.
    This wasn’t the Mouth Boy phantasm, which always looked more like a wide-snouted crocodile with no eyes at all.
    This figure in the street waved both arms upward, and she saw that its coat sleeves hung over its hands, and from the steamy puffing of its breath it seemed to be speaking rhythmically, or singing, though she couldn’t hear any sound.
    It was standing at the steps of a house, and in a moment Christina recognized the house in the dream—it was her own house, her own front door at the top of the steps.
    The flabby white cheeks glistened, as if this thing that resembled her brother were weeping at being locked outside.
    â€œWait,” she said, and she realized that she had sat up in bed and was awake, and speaking out loud in the close darkness. “I’ll let you in.”
    Her heart was pounding and her pulse thudded in her temples, and she wasn’t able to take a deep breath, but she stepped out of bed straight toward the bedroom door, letting the curtain slide over her head till the hem of it fell off behind her like a discarded shawl, and she opened the door and stole down the stairs to the street door.
II.
    So in these grounds, perhaps in the orchard, I lighted upon a dead mouse. The dead mouse moved my sympathy: I took him up, buried him comfortably in a mossy bed, and bore the spot in mind.
    It may have been a day or two afterward that I returned, removed the moss coverlet, and looked … a black insect emerged. I fled in horror, and for long years ensuing I never mentioned this ghastly adventure to anyone.
    â€” Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: A Reading Diary
    That September the summer twilight still extended past supper and the hour for the Read girls to go to bed, and so Maria and her visiting sister were permitted to take horses from the stable and ride as far as the family chapel and back.
    The rosemary-scented breeze fluttered the girls’ skirts as they rode slowly along the dirt path between the shadow-streaked grassy hills. Maria wore a long black riding habit loaned to her by Mrs. Read, and in spite of her stoutness she rode comfortably sidesaddle on a chestnut mare, but Christina, though she was riding more securely astride a man’s saddle, was terrified whenever her gray gelding broke into a trot.
    â€œHe’s a gentle old thing,” Maria called to her. “You can simply relax and move with him.”
    â€œI feel like a tennis ball,” said Christina breathlessly, “being bounced up and down on a racket. One time I’ll—miss the racket when I come down, and I— don’t see any way to fall off which doesn’t—involve landing on my head.” She smiled, but her face was misted with sweat and she felt as though her teeth might at any moment start chattering.
    Maria reined in her own mount so that Christina’s would subside to a steady walk.
    â€œYou’ll be returning to London with a much rosier complexion than you left with,” Maria observed. “Sun and fresh air have done it.”
    â€œPossibly.” Christina knew that she had not regained any weight during this week in the country at the house of Maria’s employers, and on the few occasions when she had ventured out into the sunlight she had been wearing a hat.