The Caged Graves

by Dianne K. Salerni

  “I don’t remember them,” Verity agreed sadly.

  “Pity,” said Aunt Clara. “I always liked Sarah Ann. Her passing caused me great sorrow. If you need help with the wreaths, Liza will assist you. She has a knack for such things.”

  A lifetime of practice enabled Verity to speak the complete truth without a moment’s hesitation. “If I need Liza’s help, I shall definitely ask for it.” She stepped into her cousin’s dress and pulled it up. Liza was so tall that the skirt dragged on the ground. “I’m very sorry about Piper getting hurt this morning, Aunt Clara.”

  “A small army couldn’t keep that boy out of trouble,” her aunt replied, unconcerned. “We’re lucky the war ended before he became old enough to run off and join.”

  “Did Uncle John serve?” Verity asked.

  “No, he paid a Poole to go in his place, same as Michael McClure did.” Aunt Clara helped Verity button up the back of the dress. “Nathaniel’s father was too sick to serve; anyone could see that. He should never have been called up.”

  “I agree.” Verity had seen the army take men and boys who ought to have been unfit for service. She had never met Nathaniel’s father, but she knew he’d been ill even before the war started and had spent his final year of life bedridden.

  Her aunt shook her head disapprovingly. “The Poole man whom John paid was killed at Gettysburg. But Michael’s substitute used his fee for college after the war, if you can believe it.”

  Verity glanced at her aunt with surprise. It sounded as if Aunt Clara would rather the paid substitute had done his duty and died, rather than have the audacity to survive and attend college. “What about Nathaniel?” She hoped her intended husband had not paid another man to fight in his place. Not that she would have wanted him injured or killed, but . . .

  “Nathaniel was eager to go, but his mother made him promise to wait until he was sixteen, and by that time the war was over.” Aunt Clara eyed Verity sternly. “Life’s a battle—in peacetime and in wartime. People do whatever they have to. Best you learn that while you’re young.”

  It was a strange sentiment, and rather disturbing. Before Verity could wonder too much about it, her aunt smiled and said, “I’ll let your dress soak overnight. Send Beulah for it in the morning.”

  Verity didn’t want to ask any special favors of Beulah. “I can come back for it.”

  Aunt Clara smiled knowingly. “Send Beulah,” she repeated. “Don’t let that woman intimidate you. She’s had the run of your father’s house for too many years. I’m sure she hasn’t taken to the idea of a new mistress, but you need to put her in her place.”

  Verity retrieved her basket of ribbon and said her goodbyes. Liza followed Verity through the house and onto the front porch. “I know you’re not going to ask me to help with those wreaths,” Liza said, “but I wouldn’t have done it anyway.”

  “Then we are in agreement that you won’t be helping,” Verity responded with icy politeness.

  “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t disturb that grave,” Liza went on.

  Verity narrowed her eyes. “Do you have something to say about my mother?”

  She was ready to pick a quarrel, but Liza just smiled nastily. “Not your mother—her.” The girl glanced back at the house, then leaned forward and whispered, “Asenath was a witch, you know.”

  “How would you know?” Verity asked. “She was dead before you were born.”

  “Her family’s chock-full of witches. People say there’s a blood curse on the lot of them.”

  “People are ignorant,” Verity retorted, eyeing Liza up and down so the girl would know exactly which people she meant.

  Liza persisted. “Why do you think they put that cage on her grave?”

  Verity knew she ought not to respond, but she couldn’t help herself. “Why do you think?”

  “To make sure she didn’t get out. In your mother’s case, it was only a precaution, but with Asenath . . . there was reason for concern.” Liza’s smile was sinister now. “In Catawissa sometimes the dead don’t stay where you put them.”

  Verity went home heartsick.

  Her father clearly hadn’t told her the whole story. There was some stain on her mother’s reputation, something to do with the girl buried next to her. The two cages served as a reminder, making sure no one in town ever forgot.

  If the two women had done nothing wrong, as her father claimed, why had he needed to bury them in such a fashion? Why hadn’t her father and her uncle stood up for their wives?

  If Verity was going to marry Nathaniel McClure and make a decent life for herself in this town, she was going to have to find out, and then find a remedy.

  As for her cousin Liza—for all Verity cared, the girl could pine away from jealousy.

  Seven

  DURING VERITY’S absence, calling cards had been left at the Boone house on behalf of Mrs. James Campbell, Mrs. Timothy Abbet, and Mrs. William McKelvy.

  Nate’s sisters.

  Verity bolted upstairs to rip off Liza’s horrible dress and put on one of her own. Mindful of Aunt Clara’s advice, she next cornered Beulah in the kitchen and persuaded her to return one of her own calling cards to the McClure house, along with a note stating she would be home to visitors that afternoon.

  Then she set about preparing her father’s neglected parlor for callers. Stealing a cornflower-blue sash from one of her old dresses, Verity tied back the curtains to let in the sunlight. She found two matching vases in the dining room china cabinet and filled them with boughs from a flowering tree across the road. She removed an ugly tarnished mirror from the wall and replaced it with her mother’s portrait. By the time the three women arrived to pay their social call, Verity was dressed, primped, and seated in an improved parlor, determined to make a better impression on the sisters than she had on the brother.

  All three of the McClure ladies were dark haired, blue eyed, and rosy cheeked. The younger two, Harriet and Caroline, were twenty and twenty-two, respectively, and the eldest, Anne, almost thirty. Within ten minutes of their arrival, they’d convinced Verity to call them by their pet names—Annie, Carrie, and Hattie. They inquired about her health, they asked about her family in Worcester, they wanted to know her favorite color and whether she preferred needlepoint or embroidery.

  But mostly they talked about Nate.

  They adored their younger brother and were eager to regale Verity with all his positive traits: he was hard working and loyal and earnest and kind. Verity had to smile and couldn’t help but warm toward their description of him. Oh, he had his faults, too. The sisters agreed that he could sometimes be too hard working—and probably too earnest—and kind to a fault. In fact, his virtues were his biggest faults. When Annie confessed that no one had ever been able to get Nate to eat carrots, as if this were the most terrible thing she could say about him, Verity laughed.

  At first Verity thought they were trying to repair yesterday’s disaster, but the more they talked, the more clear it became that they knew nothing about it; they thought Nate had left for Wilkes-Barre without meeting her. Verity felt relieved that he’d kept their ill-fated excursion to himself, another point in his favor. However, his sisters seemed to be the only ones to call him Nate instead of Nathaniel. This reinforced her conviction that their hands had guided all the letters he’d written, including the one in which he invited her to use that name.

  “Have you been busy since your arrival?” Carrie asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole town were trying to get a look at Ransloe Boone’s daughter! Whom have you met?”

  “I haven’t had many callers yet,” Verity admitted, carefully not mentioning Nate’s visit. “Today I spent the entire morning failing to mind the Thomas boys carefully enough and then helping to stitch one up.” She described her attempts to prevent her cousins from being trampled, run over, crushed, or maimed. “Luckily for me,” she said, “Piper’s telling everyone his injury came from fighting a deserter over General Washington’s payroll.”
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  “Oh, is he, now?” Carrie leaned forward, her eyes twinkling. “He hasn’t said where the payroll’s hidden, has he?”

  “Carrie!” Annie gasped, tapping her sister with her fan. “For shame!”

  “Well, if anyone knows, it’s those boys!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Verity.

  The sisters seemed caught between laughter and embarrassment.

  “It’s the old story about the Battle of Wyoming and the lost treasure,” Hattie said. “Carrie, you silly thing! All the boys play that game; it doesn’t mean anything! Nate used to act it out when he was little. He made me play old Silas all the time, running through the swamp and knifing people—”

  Annie exclaimed, “Hattie!”

  Verity laughed. “I don’t know the story, but that does sound like what they were playing.”

  “It was part of the Battle of Wyoming, in the War for Independence,” Carrie said.

  “I learned about it at school.” Verity cast her mind back. “As I recall, we lost.”

  “The Americans were ambushed and routed,” Hattie confirmed. “Afterward the British ordered the Indians to burn all the homesteads in the area.”

  “The Indians were working with the British?”

  “Indeed. Mohawks, mostly,” said Carrie. “With French blood. They had a score to settle with the Americans.”

  “Dutch blood, too,” put in Hattie.

  “Not Dutch,” Annie corrected.

  Hattie pursed her lips. “Yes, Dutch. I know there’s Vanderpooles in that line.”

  “Very true! The name was shortened to Poole somewhere along the way.” Carrie raised her eyebrows at Verity. “Your Beulah Poole’s ancestors were on the wrong side of that war, and most people around here never forgot it.”

  “The British captured or killed most of the patriot soldiers,” Hattie continued, “but according to legend, some of the men got away with a whole packet of gold coins, a payroll for the Continental army. They disappeared into a swamp—”

  “Along with all the settlers who were trying to escape the Indian raiders,” added Annie.

  “And none of them ever came out again.” Hattie lowered her voice to a sepulchral tone. “We call that place the Shades of Death now.” Verity shuddered obligingly, and Hattie appeared gratified.

  “Well,” Carrie said, “one man came out—with the gold. Silas Clayton.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Annie replied. “His descendants live here still, and they’re as poor as dirt.”

  “Because the army caught up with him a few years later and shot him for desertion,” Harriet retorted. “And no one ever found where he hid the gold.”

  Carrie turned to Verity again. “Over the years there’ve been stories of gold coins turning up. Boys—and grown men, too—have been searching the swamp for almost a century, looking for the lost payroll.”

  “No one ever found it, though,” said Annie.

  “As far as we know,” murmured Hattie slyly.

  Hattie and Carrie burst into giggles, and Annie swatted them both with her fan. Verity looked back and forth among the three of them, smiling. “I would like very much to share the joke.”

  “It’s not a joke,” Annie said, “only a silly rumor.”

  “I’m sorry, Verity,” Carrie said. “It’s just that your father and your uncle were known to be ardent treasure hunters when they were younger.”

  “My father?”

  Annie nodded regretfully. “He spent half his youth trudging through the swamp looking for that payroll.”

  “Well, boys will be boys,” Verity murmured. It did sound like the kind of thing her uncle would do. But her father . . . ?

  “Very true. Every inch of that swamp has probably been searched by now.” Carrie looked at Verity from beneath coyly lowered lashes. “Some people say the lost treasure isn’t really all that lost.”

  When the sisters were ready to depart, they hugged Verity affectionately, as if she were already a member of their family. Annie, in particular, held her close and kissed her cheek. “I remember your mother as if it were yesterday,” she said unexpectedly, glancing at the portrait of Sarah Ann Boone. “I was only fourteen when she died, and I was brokenhearted.”

  With effort, Verity managed to bite back her questions. What was she like? Why was she buried that way? What had she done? She couldn’t ask Nate’s sisters questions like that on their first meeting. Instead, she thanked Annie for her kind words.

  The eldest McClure sister fluffed Verity’s curls fondly. “I remember you, too, when you were a baby. Such a beautiful, golden-haired angel! How I loved to come down here and hold you! There were nothing but dark-haired scamps at my house.”

  “She means us,” exclaimed Carrie, putting an arm around Hattie’s waist. “Dark-haired scamps!”

  Verity laughed. She wished her meeting with Nate had gone half as well as this one had. Still, if she could get along with the sisters, she ought to be able to rectify her gauche mistakes with Nate.

  On Friday.

  Late that evening, Verity heard a loud thumping outside her room. She rose from the chair at the dressing table where she’d been composing a letter to Polly and went out to the second floor hallway.

  The narrow door between her father’s room and her own, which led to the attic stairs, stood open. She poked her head into the cramped, boxed-in space and discovered her father easing a large wooden trunk down the steep, curved staircase. Verity went to help him, grabbing a worn leather handle. It was heavy, and her father called out gruffly, “Watch yourself, child!”

  Beulah peeked around the doorway of her room at the end of the hall. She crossed her arms and watched them, her nut-brown face disapproving. After they had managed to get the thing down without injury, she disappeared back into her room.

  Verity blew dust off the trunk. “What is this?” she asked. Briefly, she thought of Revolutionary War treasure, but her father didn’t seem like the sort of man who would hide a fortune in gold coins in his attic.

  Ransloe Boone cleared his throat awkwardly. “I’m ashamed you had to come across your mother’s grave by accident,” he said. “And I’m sorry you know so little about her. I’d like to make that up to you, if I can.”

  Leaning over, he briskly unbuckled the leather straps on the trunk, then swung open the lid. Dresses, handkerchiefs, bonnets, little wooden boxes, sachets, and bottles of toiletry items filled the trunk. Verity realized she was looking at her mother’s possessions.

  “There’s more upstairs,” her father said. “Dress patterns and fabric and books. Boxes she stored away over the years. You can have anything of hers you want.”

  He dragged the trunk into Verity’s room and looked around while she dusted it off. “Getting crowded in here,” he remarked.

  “My trunks can go to the attic,” Verity said. “I’ll have everything I need out of them by tomorrow morning. Thank you, Father. This is a wonderful gift.” She hesitated. Her mother’s trunk served as an apology, but an actual conversation would make a better one. “I did not mean to accuse you yesterday. I only wanted to know—”

  Ransloe Boone backed away, his expression ending their discussion like a shutter closing off a window. “You’ll have to trust me, Verity,” he said gruffly. “I did the best for her I could under difficult circumstances.” Then, with a muttered “Good night,” he left and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Verity was drawn first to the collection of boxes inside the trunk. Most were made of wood, varying from the size of a prayer book to an egg, but one was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and another was made of silver and had a felt lining. Verity sat down on the floor and opened them all with a sense of awe. Some held pins; one held sewing supplies. The box with the pearl inlay held a stack of calling cards imprinted with her mother’s name: Mrs. Ransloe Boone. In the silver box she discovered a cache of photographs.

  One of the first to catch her eye was a portrait of a very young and surp
risingly handsome Ransloe Boone. In another photograph she recognized Maryett Gaines, seated with a sleeping baby on her lap who was most likely Polly. Ransloe’s cousins, someone—probably Sarah Ann—had written on the back.

  In the next photograph to come out of the box she recognized Uncle John, but the girl with him in the picture surprised her. She’d thought her mother, Sarah Ann, was lovely, but this young woman possessed an astonishing otherworldly beauty. Asenath and John—Verity knew it even before she saw the back. Now she understood the dreamy look that had come over her uncle’s face when she’d mentioned his first wife, and she felt a pang of sympathy for Aunt Clara. Asenath looked like a princess in a fairy-tale book. The wide-set eyes in her heart-shaped face must have been the lightest blue. Her fair hair, completely colorless in the photograph, was worn in loops and loops of braids that hung down over both her shoulders. Even her dress was white.

  She wondered if Liza Thomas had ever seen a picture of Asenath. The girl in this photograph couldn’t have been a witch.

  Eight

  VERITY PLANNED on her second visit to the cemetery being more productive than her first. She went armed with a hand trowel and two baskets full of forget-me-nots and ivy from Aunt Clara’s garden. When she knelt to arrange the plants, however, she noticed that the stone with her mother’s initials lay upside down inside the cage. Puzzled at first, Verity concluded that someone had pried it up and turned it over, perhaps by inserting a crowbar through the latticework.

  Shocked and angry, she looked around—at the cemetery, the woods, up the road—as if the culprit might still be lurking nearby. When her eyes landed on the minister’s house across the road, she decided the time was right to pay a visit.