They picked him up fondly, and escorted him on his way. One of the Peacock brothers, staring up at the winking giant as it passed over, missed his footing and fell on his face, shattering his jaw. Still they came, swinging open the back gate of the cemetery and threading their way across the wasteland towards the Elysium. Sufficient to say they rose: their burial finery fly born, their faces stripped of all but the foundation of beauty. Everywhere faces pressed at the cracks of the tomb lids-was that not Kezia Reynolds with her child, who'd lived just a day, in her arms? and Martin van de Linde (the Memory of the Just is Blessed) whose wife had never been found Rosa and Selina Goldfinch: upstanding women both and Thomas Jerrey, and-Too many names to mention. In one corner, Alfred Crawshaw (Captain in the 17th Lancers), was helping his lovely wife Emma from the rot of their bed. Joseph Jardine, en famille, was not far behind the Hancocks, as was Marriott Fletcher, and Anne Snell, and the Peacock Brothers the list went on and on. Her husband Gerard was with her, he less fresh than she, having been dead thirteen years longer. Nobody saw Charlotte Hancock open the door of her sepulchre, with the beating wings of pigeons applauding her vigour as she shambled out to meet the moon. Nobody was watching that night, it was too bitter for lovers.
The whole company sniffed the success a success which had been snatched miraculously from the jaws of disaster. In his office, Hammersmith dimly registered the brittle din of adulation through a haze of booze.īackstage, a kind of buoyant confidence had set in. "In fact, I think I can see him from here." "He'll be upstairs, in the Gods," said Lichfield. "What is it?" she asked, her fluting voice still affecting life.
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