The Kingdom of Bones

FIFTY-FOUR

On a spring morning in the year of nineteen hundred and eleven, the same morning—entirely by chance—that the transatlantic steamer bringing Sebastian Becker and his small extended family to England made its arrival at Southampton dock, a woman and a child passed through the bastard mix of castle wall and cathedral windows that was the gatehouse of Highgate’s Western Cemetery. They made their way through avenues of memorial stones and mausoleums toward the upper terrace.

Highgate Cemetery, on London’s Highgate Hill, was not always the place of romantic decay that it has now become. It was then a city of the decent dead, a privately run enterprise kept in order by the constant attention of a team of landscape gardeners. Graves that are now engulfed by creeping ivy stood out on open hillside. Today’s soot-stained, derelict vaults were originally scrubbed and solid, like provincial banks with their assets in bones. Statuary gleamed with the purity of new marble. Urns spilled over with flowers, where they would one day brim with dirt and moss. Its neatly kept and winding ways ran from the sunken catacombs of its Lebanon Circle, all the way up to the high terrace with its view across London as far as the East End.

The woman knew where she was going. The child did not, and stared about her. This place was both captivating and disturbing. It was as if she had dreamed of a garden of toys and playhouses, all drained of life and color.

The path climbed a grassy slope. Then the gravel way leveled out and they passed along a row of monuments, each an act of morbid imagination. Stone women wept, petrified torches burned with sculpted flames. Stone angels spread their wings and raised their arms, their majesty frozen as if stilled by a curse in mid-exaltation.

The child did not know why she was here. She carried a small posy of flowers that her mother had given to her before they left home, and which she suspected she would soon have to give up. No matter. She was tiring of them.

Her mother seemed to have found what she was looking for. The monument at which they stopped was far from the biggest or the grandest, but it was one of the most intriguing. A plinth had been raised to a height of about two feet. On the plinth stood a granite sepulchre with sloping sides and a pitched-roof lid. The mason had made a couple of gestures toward classical detailing but the overall effect was homely, like an upturned bathtub.

At the foot of the sepulchre lay a stone dog of indeterminate breed. Its head was on its paws and the sculptor had managed to infuse it with a sense of enormous dejection. The child looked at it and thought how sad its eyes were…although, of course, it had no actual eyes at all. Its body was smooth and muscled. She feared to touch it, lest it proved to be more than stone.

On the end of the tomb above the dog was an inset circle. It framed a relief carving of a man’s head in profile, like a king on a coin.

“Who’s buried here, Mother?” she said.

“A good man,” her mother said. “The best I’ll ever know.”

The child stared at the relief. Whoever he was, he lived in history now. All kinds of people lived in history. None of them was ever quite real.

Her mother told her to lay down the flowers. She put them on the plinth. Her mother moved them to the middle and turned the posy around the other way. Then she stepped back and stood there for a long time without saying anything.

The girl moved her weight from one foot to another, until her mother’s silent touch on her shoulder made her stop. She didn’t move again. What if every time she moved, she had to start the wait all over again from the beginning? They’d be here forever.

So she watched a bird. It came and went a few times. One of the times, it had a twig in its beak.

She wondered if it would be wrong to take some of the flowers from the graves that had many, and place them on the graves that had none.

Finally, her mother said, “Come on,” and took her hand.

They descended toward the gatehouse. She looked back once, before the monument was lost to sight. Her mother didn’t say anything, and she didn’t break the silence herself, in case she spoke out of turn. She sensed that this was not the time for it.

It had been an odd day out. She’d had to dress in her best. She never found out why. Over the next few years, her mother would sometimes ask her if she remembered that morning. But she was growing fast, and new things were happening all the time. She would always pretend that she did, although most of it had soon faded.

She would remember the mixture of anxiety and fascination she’d experienced walking through that gated necropolis. That feeling would never leave her. But for the rest of it…she grew to accept there were mysteries about her mother that she could never hope to understand. If she ever recalled a purpose to the visit, it would only be in the vaguest of terms.

She’d think of it as just another of those odd remembered things in a child’s world.

Usually as the day that she left some flowers for a dog.