All of Them Vampires!

Highgate Cemetery, London, Autumn 1869

Highgate Cemetery, London, Autumn 1869John Everett Millais examined hands lean and white in the pallid glimmer of moonlight. They were not the hands of a man used to much digging but the hands solely of the painter, the artist, a man whose paintings graced the walls of the Royal Academy. Here he was, with his artist’s hands leaning on a shovel desecrating a grave. Above him the tall frame and wild black hair of Danté Gabriel Rossetti was pitched against the moonlight. The meagre wisps of passing cloud were not enough to obscure their crime and Millais’ initial curses began to give way to the panic he entertained in the bare hollow that was the pit of his stomach.

“Gabriel this is madness. Cease, please!” He almost screamed at him. “I don’t relish spending the rest of my life in prison. I have too much to live for.” He dared to voice his thoughts when he recollected Effie his wife at home with their children. Grave robbing carried a price; a possible prison sentence for anyone caught perpetrating it.

“I’ve found them John!” Rossetti paused from his work to catch a breath. There was the sound of a metallic sharpness as he plunged the shovel back into the earth for a moment to wipe at his sweating brow. He removed his jacket to expose his lean torso with his shirt thrown open to the waist. The black Italian eyes scrutinised the other man with disdain, if only momentarily, that he should have left him to do the work.

“But...” Millais cleared his throat; shivered inside his coat. He already hated the place with its mist shrouded gravestones, giant granite monstrosities emblazoned against the moonlight. Another shudder possessed him when an owl hooted somewhere in the distance. The swirling mist, like lethal fingers manipulating his spine began to glide an icy dance macabre against the gravestones while he reflected on the sobriety of it all.

“But... but she... she’s been dead this...” He swallowed anxiously, startling once again at the owl hooting its raucous cry conducive to sending another shiver coursing through him. “She’s been dead this seven years Gabriel!” There, he’d said it, while his gaze dropped away immediately, aware that if he stared deeper and profoundly deeper into the gaping chasm now opening up before him, she might rise up from her coffin to... to... the words he refused to utter aloud, or even think because of the stories he’d heard, but had not intended to heed.

“Don’t you think I don’t know that John?” Rossetti swiped at the beads of dust lining his countenance. Already his normally smoothly shaven features were beginning to display the signs of stubble. Or was it something else that Millais wondered he could read on the demented face of his friend. Rossetti was a tortured soul and had been ever since she had killed herself, causing Millais to entertain the maniacal crazy notion that it was not merely a book of poetry he was after. Who in their right mind would resort to grave robbing, risking his freedom, perhaps his very sanity, for a mere book? Was it because Rossetti missed his wife so much that he had to look upon her face again? Lizzie had been dead for seven years. Everyone knows the grave is merciless. The worms. The rotting earth. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddar Rossetti. And why had she killed herself? Because of her husband and his womanising ways!

“You only loved her after she died and now you wish to look upon her face, a face that will no longer be beautiful!”

“Look John, if you don’t want to help me...”

Millais paused to slip the watch from his waistcoat pocket and stare at it in dismay. Two minutes to midnight. Effie would be worried sick by now as she invariably did when he’d informed her that he’d embarked on some wild affair with Gabriel. She’d grown to hate Gabriel over the years, certainly after Lizzie’s death. ‘You’re a famous man now John. You don’t have to align yourself with the likes of him. He’ll either end up in prison or Bedlam, mark my words’ she would say. If caught grave robbing, the former seemed likely, or perhaps with what they were about to look upon there was a distinct possibility of winding up in the latter.

“For God’s sake, John!” Rossetti reached to grab the fob watch, but Millais, aware of his intention quickly placed it back into his waistcoat. The watch was an expensive one and he had visions of it falling into Lizzie’s grave.

“We’re almost there” Rossetti said breathlessly, mopping his brow. “When this is over we will go and have a few draughts of ale.

Millais shook his head. His features, scared and white in the moonlight reminded Rossetti of one of the cherub portraits his friend like to paint; the ones they had ridiculed but were to make his name.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s darkly handsome visage was partially eclipsed by a cloud passing across the moon so that it was only his strong white teeth that were exposed into relief.

“I’m almost there. The poems...”

“Are you certain it is simply the poems you are after Gabriel?”

Rossetti’s face darkened further. Afforded by this dank holy place Millais entertained an uneasy sensation that Gabriel was about to strike him, but the smile returned as if nothing untoward had fazed him.

“Of course, John. What else?”

“But... seven years Gabriel...” Millais protested.

“Sometimes John you behave like an old maiden aunt who wants nothing better than to stay out of prison.”

“Why all this talk of prison? We won’t go to prison.”

“There will be worse places than prison when you look upon her face.” Millais words were punctuated once more by shivers. “It... it could drive you mad.”

“Then John...” Rossetti slapped his shoulder... “I shall not look upon her face.”

To Millais’ horror, even after all the hours of solid digging, Rossetti jumped agilely into the now open grave.

“The Book! It’s still there, John!” he shouted back.

“Where else would it be Gabriel unless someone had been there before you.”

It was as if Rossetti had not heard him. He retrieved the now somewhat tattered leather bound volume of the poems he had written to his wife with the realisation that, because he could no longer have her in death, how he had neglected her in life. His hands trembled so badly he could hardly keep them still. He moved, as if guided by a hellish impulse to lift the coffin lid to reveal... what? Some terrible horror unleashed from the infernal gates of Hell itself?

The face framed by the glorious titian hair, the hair that had inspired so many of his paintings, now spilled in all its golden tresses across the white lawn nightgown in which she had been buried. Her eyes were closed, but intact. Seven years had changed nothing. She appeared to be merely asleep. Her mouth was still red and moist. When he dared to press his lips to hers in that macabre moonlit tableau he discovered they were as cold as ice. He imagined she whispered his name ‘Gabriel’ so tenderly. It was all he could do not to bring himself to leave there. The impulse was strong enough to raise her bodily from her silken bed and take her into his arms as he had done in life.

“Gabriel!” But his name did not issue from her lips. The voice was a masculine one and Rossetti realised with a start that Lizzie was in his arms and John Millais appeared on the verge of collapse.

“For God’s sake!” Millais crossed himself hurriedly. “What are you doing?” but his words trailed. He could no longer speak.

All these years had rolled by and Rossetti’s wife was in his arms the way she used to be. Seven years in her tomb had changed nothing. She had not even begun to decompose. She appeared little different than the day they had buried her and Rossetti had collapsed at her graveside mumbling incoherently about her ghost returning to haunt him.

“John, she has not begun to decompose!” Rossetti’s voice was wild with excitement, failing to realise that there was something radically wrong here.

Millais shivered again on recollection of all the tales he’d heard of unspeakable creatures rising from their tombs to... to... “Mayhap it was the Laudanum John. It may have preserved her.”

Rossetti laughed and cried all at once, further confirming Millais’ fears that his friend had become demented.

“Perhaps Gabriel, but sh... shouldn’t you leave her there? Sudden exposure to the night air might...” Words failed him and the painter realised he would probably endure nightmares for weeks now.

“See her nails, her skin!”

Rossetti’s erstwhile excitement at discovering his wife’s body intact thrilled though Millais’ brain like a death sentence.

“They are still growing. What devilry is this?”

“Please put her back Gabriel!” John Millais promptly vomited up the meal he had consumed hastily so as to pursue this mad venture with his equally mad companion.

Rossetti clutched the book of poems as if it were a trophy. Sighing heavily he retrieved the shovel from the mound of earth as if it were the Sword in the Stone. “Help me, John” he urged, swiping a palm across his sweating brow.

Reluctantly Millais retrieved his own spade and saw with something akin to relief that Rossetti had returned Lizzie’s body to its silken resting place and had closed the lid of the coffin. He longed to warn Rossetti that he might have unearthed something he shouldn’t but his friend was too far enwrapped with his excitement to dwell upon the fact that his late wife should have remained so untouched by the normal processes of death and the grave.

But Rossetti was acutely aware of why she should have remained so. It was a secret known only to himself.

Green eyes flashing wide, Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti’s mouth fashioned a smile and the name ‘Gabriel’ was whispered softly from once bloodless lips.