This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Page A

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