This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Page B

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