The Orphan of Cemetery Hill

by Hester Fox

  When she realized that he was staring at her expectantly, she finally sprang into action, commandeering his neckcloth and tearing it into strips of bandaging. There was something in his smile, the easy openness of his demeanor that made Tabby absurdly eager to please him. He could have asked her to cut off her thick red hair, and she would have asked him how much he would have. Her head told her that she couldn’t trust him, not completely, but her heart wanted more than anything to earn another smile from him.

  As she dabbed at the wound, the question of how he’d come by his black eye burned on the tip her tongue. As if reading her mind, he said, “Found myself a bit down on my luck after a night of cards, and without the snuff to pay my debt.” Then he cleared his throat and carefully shifted his gaze away. “There, uh, might also have been the matter of a kiss stolen from Big Jack Corden’s sister.”

  Card debts! Stolen kisses! This boy—no, this young man—brought a sense of worldly danger and excitement into the cemetery with him. Tabby pressed her lips together, knowing that anything she might say would only give her away as a country bumpkin in his eyes.

  Yet there was something in the way he kept clearing his throat, the downward shift of his gaze, that made her wonder if there wasn’t another explanation, something not nearly so dashing, that he wasn’t telling her. Tabby was well versed in the language of violence, and how adults visited it on the small bodies of children. She did not for one moment believe that his injuries were the result of an overprotective brother.

  Tabby was silent as she wrapped the bandage around the cleaned cut, the shadowy images of the grave robbers receding in her mind as the sky continued to lighten. “Didn’t think I would meet an angel in the graveyard when I stumbled in here,” he said, giving her another grin.

  Heat rushed to Tabby’s cheeks and she ducked her head, concentrating on tying off the knot. She should have been frightened of him, frightened that he might somehow know her aunt and uncle and toss her over his shoulder and deliver her back up to them, or tell the caretaker that there was a filthy girl living in the graveyard. But there was a warmth in his soft brown eyes and she felt a camaraderie with him.

  “Well,” he said, inspecting her rather sloppy handiwork, “that will have to do.” He tested his weight on the leg, grunting a little as he righted himself. He cast a reluctant look at the brightening horizon and sighed. “I suppose I should be going.”

  But he made no move to leave. He was gazing hard into the distance, as if he was determined to stop the sun from rising by sheer force of will. When he spoke again his voice was so soft, so different from his previous bluster. “Do you...do you ever feel as if you don’t matter? That your life is already mapped out for you, and your wishes are inconsequential? And that even if you accept your lot, bow down and take it gladly, it’s still not enough. Just by virtue of being you you’re a disappointment, with no hope of redemption.”

  It was a rather grown-up speech, and though Tabby didn’t know the source from which it sprang, she did know what it felt like to not matter. She might have told him as much, but he was already smoothing back his curls and clearing his throat. “Well, I should be going back,” he repeated with resigned conviction. “I won’t ask what a little thing like you is doing all alone at night in a graveyard, if you forget that you ever saw me.” Then he gave her a heart-melting wink, and was gone.

  Tabby stood in the cool night air, her blood pounding fast and hot. It stung that he referred to her as “a little thing,” but one thing was for certain: Tabby would never, ever forget the dashing young man with kind eyes.

  * * *

  Every night for the next week, Tabby crept out into the cemetery, waiting with her heart in her throat to see if the young man would return. She knew it was foolish, knew that it was dangerous, but she couldn’t help herself. Even just to catch a glimpse of him would help staunch the flow of loneliness that threatened to drain her completely. As far as she knew, Alice had never returned for her, and whatever little flame of hope had flickered in her heart was well and truly extinguished now.

  So on the eighth night when Tabby heard the rustle of weeds, she hardly thought twice before stealing behind the column and waiting for the young man to appear, her lips already curving into a smile in anticipation. But her smile faded as a sinister figure dressed all in black materialized out of the gloom. A sinister figure whom she had seen before.

  The next day, Tabby watched as the caretaker stood by the empty grave and rubbed a weary hand over his face. After the robbery the previous week, he had walked the perimeter of the cemetery, repairing the fencing and checking the locks on the gate, but had not summoned the police. But it seemed that fences and locks could not stop the grave robbers. She had developed a sort of affinity from afar for the gentle man with the long, careworn face, and it made her bruised heart hurt to see him brought so low.

  She had known that there was evil in the world, had seen the darkness and greed that had driven her aunt and uncle, had felt the devastating injustice of being robbed of her parents. But she had never known the depth of depravity that could lead men to steal the bodies of the dead. The trials of this world were bearable because of the promise of divine rest, of reuniting with loved ones on the other side; how could anyone endure life otherwise?

  As she watched the caretaker heave a sigh and get to his knees to clean the gravesite, Tabby vowed that someday she would see the men that did such vile deeds brought to justice.

  2

  IN WHICH THERE IS A REUNION.

  Boston, June 1856

  THE CARRIAGE JUTTED and lurched over the steep cobblestoned hill, threatening to bring Caleb’s lunch up all over his neatly pressed suit. Perhaps if it did then he would have an excuse to bolt. Caleb hated funerals. Well, he supposed that no one really enjoyed funerals, but it was more than that. They were just so...so messy. All that sobbing and wailing, and never mind the ridiculous costumes. (Caleb drew the line at those absurd weeping veils that men insisted on putting on their beaver hats—better to leave all that frippery to the ladies.) They were public displays of what should be private. When he died—which, God willing, wouldn’t be for decades yet—he hoped that his friends would just quietly put him in a grave, raise a glass to his memory, and be done with it.

  Across from him, his mother was exemplifying just the kind of fuss that Caleb was sure his father wouldn’t have tolerated. She was burying her face in his last clean handkerchief, bawling and carrying on with seemingly endless stamina. He gave her an awkward pat on her knee. “There now, Mum. All shall be well.”

  But his words had no effect; if anything, she cried only the harder.

  Caleb withdrew his hand. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel badly for his mother, it was just that this torrent of emotion had seemed to come out of nowhere. His old man had been hard on both son and wife, and Caleb was having difficulty grasping how his mother could be so grief stricken for the man who had never hesitated to raise his fist to her.

  He shot a pleading look at the lovely young woman beside him, who had thus far been quiet during the journey from the church to the cemetery. “Can’t you say anything that will bring her around?” he whispered to his fiancée.

  “She’s grieving, Caleb!” Rose hissed back.

  “No, she’s hysterical.” He raked his hand through his carefully pomaded hair before he could stop himself. “She’s gone and worked herself up into such a state that she can barely breathe.” That very morning Caleb had come down to breakfast to find his mother had engaged the services of some quack medium. The woman had told his mother that her departed husband was in God’s celestial kingdom, smiling down on her and waiting patiently for their heavenly reunion. What bosh. If his father was anywhere, it wasn’t up above, and he most certainly would not have been smiling. When Caleb had informed the medium of as much, she’d had the nerve to screech at him that he had destroyed the fragile link between worlds and that it
would cost them another ten dollars to reestablish it. He’d all but hauled the woman by her ridiculous black lace collar and thrown her out of the house.

  Squaring her slender shoulders, Rose leaned over and placed an elegant gloved hand on Caleb’s mother’s arm. “There now, Mrs. Bishop. Look, the sun is out and you couldn’t ask for a lovelier day. Surely that must be a sign that Mr. Bishop is giving you his blessing to leave off your tears and smile.”

  “Thomas hated the sun!” She let out a fresh wail and Rose gave Caleb an exasperated look. He shrugged helplessly.

  Rose tried again. “At the very least, give your poor eyes a rest. You don’t want to give the other ladies from the Benevolent Society the satisfaction of seeing you with puffy red eyes, do you?”

  His mother snuffled back her tears and gave a jerky nod. “Yes, perhaps...perhaps you’re right. Mrs. Craggs has been insufferable ever since she came back from that spa treatment in the Swiss Alps.”

  The crisis handled, Caleb settled back against the squabs and sent up a silent prayer of thanks for having such a clever woman for a fiancée. Not just for these little moments of feminine comfort she provided, but for all the practical knowledge she brought to their union, as well. His father had been dead only these three days, but already the transfer of his shipping business to Caleb had manifested in meetings with anxious investors, lawyers thrusting papers in his face that needed signing, and a hundred other irksome details. Having Rose there with her sharp eyes and easy grace had made all the difference. She was gently bred and knew just how to handle these matters. If she did not set his heart aflame with passion, well, that was hardly her fault, not when they’d both agreed that this would be a marriage of alliance and nothing more.

  Ahead of them, the hearse was struggling to make its way up the steep hill, and Caleb wondered how often coffins simply fell out the back and went coasting down the hill like toboggans. But the groaning vehicle crested the hill without incident, and then they were following it through the iron cemetery gates.

  The cemetery stopped just short of being derelict, and it certainly was not one of the fashionable garden cemeteries that sprawled around the outskirts of the city. The only reason that his father would be buried in this dreary location was that it contained the family crypt, the final resting place for Bishops going back all the way to the Mayflower. Their bloodline was a point of pride for his father, one upon which he had expounded enthusiastically and frequently.

  The burial service was mercifully brief. It seemed that Caleb’s father had not been a man to inspire fiery eulogies or long-winded remembrances. The reverend said a few words, Caleb threw a symbolic clump of warm spring dirt onto the coffin with a satisfying thud, and his mother made a pretty show of restrained sniffles. Then the black-clad pallbearers lifted the coffin and deposited it in the family crypt. All in all, it was a rather tidy affair.

  Afterward, Father’s acquaintances came up, offering their condolences and promising Caleb that they were eager to continue doing business with the family. It seemed terribly gauche to conduct business at a funeral, but no doubt his father would have been appalled if the gears of industry were to grind to a halt on account of a minor detail like death. There probably wasn’t a single person among the mourners who would have considered Mr. Bishop a friend. Despite his resentment of his father, Caleb felt a pang of pity for the old man. What a miserable legacy to leave behind.

  Caleb stared into the gaping entrance to the crypt that now housed his father’s mortal remains. There was a ridiculous bell contraption rigged up that his father had insisted upon. Supposedly, in the case of being buried alive, it would give him a lifeline to signal for help. Caleb doubted that if the bumpy ride up the hill hadn’t roused his father from his deathly slumber, that he was going to wake up at any point in the future.

  He jumped at a light touch on his arm and spun around, half expecting his old man’s ghost to be standing there, wagging his finger in disapproval.

  But it was only his lovely fiancée, her dark blue eyes filled with concern. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Rose said, “but I think your mother is ready to go home.”

  He glanced over to where his mother was dabbing at her cheeks and his heart clenched at how lost the old dear looked. The tall form of his father’s business partner, Richard Whitby, stood beside her. “Will you be a love and ask Whitby to take you both home? I’d like a little more time here.”

  Rose gave him a questioning look—she knew well that there was no love lost between him and his father—but angel that she was, she only nodded. “Of course. I’ll see you Wednesday for luncheon with my parents?”

  “Just try and stop me.” He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek.

  He watched as Whitby offered his arm to Rose, Caleb’s mother trailing behind them. When the somber clip of the funeral horses had faded, Caleb was left alone with his thoughts and the soft chorus of birds. It wasn’t that he really needed any more time to pay his respects or see the old man off, he just wanted a few moments of peace and quiet after a week of chaos. Good God, what was he going to do? His father had tried to drill the fundamentals of the shipping business into him, from how to balance the ledger to inspecting cargo, but Caleb had preferred to spend his days playing cards at the Beacon Club, and his evenings at the theater. Everything about shipping was dull and dry, and that was not to mention that a good portion of its success hinged on the trade of human souls in the Caribbean. Why could his father not have just left the business in the capable hands of Whitby? Caleb certainly didn’t want it.

  Before his old man’s heart had stopped beating, Caleb had been secretly studying books on architecture at the Athenaeum, and putting together a portfolio of sketches in the hopes of securing an apprenticeship at an architectural firm. He had always been fascinated by the grand buildings around Boston, and had dreamed of one day leaving his own mark on the city. To tell a story in stone, to immortalize his vision for a more beautiful world, was the most noble pursuit he could imagine. But now he had a mother and a fiancée who relied on him to keep a roof over their heads and his plans of designing beautiful buildings would have to be relegated to the fancies of youth.

  Sighing, Caleb stared into the gaping tomb that had swallowed up the last of his dreams, and felt only despair.

  * * *

  Tabby watched the funeral procession trudge up the hill from her window, a sluggish black stream of mourners. Burials were rare in the old cemetery nowadays, and anything other than a simple affair with a handful of mourners even rarer.

  The spectacle of the glass hearse and the team of gleaming black horses drawing it was too captivating to watch from afar. She let the ratty lace curtain fall from her fingers, then threw on a light shawl and her straw bonnet and went outside to take a closer look.

  The scent of hothouse funeral roses mingled with damp earth, and cheery sparrows, heedless of the somber occasion, dipped and chased each other among the stones. With the mild spring air on her neck, Tabby let her fingers trail along the worn tops of the headstones as she made her way toward the funeral party.

  The minister had just finished his prayer and the crowd was beginning to disperse when Tabby caught sight of a young man standing by the crypt with his back toward her. His hair had lightened from chestnut brown to a warm honey blond, and he was taller now—though still on the slight, lean side—but she would have recognized him anywhere.

  Creeping closer, it was as if she’d been thrown back to that fateful night, when he’d appeared as if by magic and sowed the seed of longing in her. More than once she had wondered what had become of the handsome young man. But he had belonged to the world of the living, and since then she had learned the hard way that the people you cared about never stayed.

  She was only a few yards away from him, so close that she could see the strong line of his jaw and his kind, expressive eyes that stared sightlessly into the crypt. As she was shifting he
r weight to get a clearer view, she accidentally stepped on a branch, snapping it and shattering the silence. The young man turned around, his gaze landing squarely on her.

  “If you’ve come for the interment, I’m afraid you’ve missed it. He’s quite at rest now, and not likely to get up again.”

  Swallowing, she stepped out fully from behind the tree and shook her head. “No, I just...” Just what? Was spying on him? Drinking in every detail of his face that had grown only more beautiful in the years since she’d seen him last? “My father is the caretaker, and he sent me to see if everything went well—if you needed anything.”

  This wasn’t strictly true, but it wasn’t untrue, either. Eli hadn’t exactly asked Tabby to check on the young man, so much as he’d asked her to make sure that all the mourners were gone so that he could replace the stone over the mouth of the crypt. And he wasn’t her father by blood, either. But over the years, Tabby had come to see the old caretaker as a father. It had been only a few days after she’d come upon the young man that long-ago night, when she was so hungry and cold that she’d had no choice but to go to his doorstep and throw herself on his mercy. He had taken Tabby under his wing, and treated the foundling from the crypt like the child he had never had.

  “The caretaker is your father? But isn’t he...” The young man trailed off, color rising in his cheeks.

  Tabby was used to this reaction, though it didn’t make it any less hurtful. She jutted her chin out, challenging him to finish his sentence. “Eli might not be my father by blood, but he’s my family.”

  “Of course, of course.” He cleared his throat, the flush of red on his cheeks gradually diminishing. “Everything went smoothly. Please give my thanks to your father.”