Verity wasn’t averse to asking Nate’s mother for help; she’d already determined that Fanny McClure was the queen of Catawissa society. But planning an event with Nate’s mother bore some resemblance to being run over by Clara Thomas’s carriage. No sooner had Verity broached the subject than half a dozen Godey’s Lady’s Books were dumped in her lap.
Mrs. McClure turned the pages so quickly that Verity could hardly take anything in. “White satin and lace for the dress, don’t you think, dear? Just like Queen Victoria.”
Verity hesitated. A dress made especially for the wedding would be a great expense, and she didn’t want to impose on her father’s generosity. “I thought I would put a new overskirt on the gown I wore to the party and change the trim on the bodice.” One of her mother’s old dresses had a lovely velvet ribbon trimming the sleeves, and Verity thought it might be nice to put something of her mother’s into her wedding gown.
“Oh no, dear. This is the wedding of my only son, and you shall have a new dress! I’ll buy the fabric and take you to my seamstress.” Verity started to protest, but Mrs. McClure didn’t give her a chance. “Don’t say a word. It’s my pleasure. Of course, it doesn’t have to be white. Now that I think about it, blue silk would be lovely with your hair. And we should consider the date. We harvest rye in July, peaches and plums through September, and then the apples start. We could have the wedding in August, or wait until November. No later than that, or snow might prevent your Massachusetts relatives from coming. What do you think? August or November?”
Verity blinked, feeling dizzy. She opened her mouth to reply, but Mrs. McClure didn’t wait for an answer. “November,” her future mother-in-law decided. “It will give us so much longer to plan.”
“Nathaniel might have an opinion on the matter,” Verity said.
Fanny McClure graced her with a confident smile. “Nathaniel will do what I tell him to do.”
A day later, Nate announced that he and Carrie’s husband were traveling to Lancaster County to look at a new variety of plum tree, and Verity accused him of making a cowardly retreat. “You’re escaping your mother.”
“I am not,” Nate protested. “Timothy and I have planned this trip for weeks. It has nothing to do with being forced to look at wedding invitations in Godey’s.”
“He’s a terrible liar, isn’t he, Beulah?”
“I couldn’t say, Miss Verity.” The housekeeper sat in a corner of the parlor, sewing. After Ransloe Boone had caught Verity and Nate on the back stoop, he’d asked Beulah to chaperone their visits. No matter. Verity was certain Nate could slip in a kiss when she walked him to the door.
“I’ll miss you while I’m gone,” Nate said. “And that’s the truth.”
“You’ll probably forget all about me, you fickle thing,” Verity chided him. “The way you forgot all about poor Amelie Eggars after staring at her in church.”
“I did stare,” he admitted ruefully, “when the sermon was really dull. I used to wonder why her eyebrow grew straight across her forehead the way it does.”
“Shame on you,” Verity said, although she couldn’t smother her grin.
“What are you going to do while I’m gone?” he asked then. “Promise me you won’t spend the whole time with your nose in those diaries. I’m almost sorry I fetched them for you, they make you so sad.”
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing for me to want to know my mother.”
“No, but that’s not all you’re doing. The past is the past. I wish you’d let it go.” Nate sat up straight and eyed her with firm command. “See here. I want you to visit my sisters while I’m gone. If you want something to read—why, Annie can lend you a dozen books of poetry. For pity’s sake, Verity, if you’ll promise to put those diaries away for a while, I’ll—I’ll read one of those books myself. I’ll even”—he looked mildly panicked—“memorize verses and recite them for you.”
She raised her eyebrows in a challenge. “I’ll give you back the one you sent me. You can learn a few verses by Barrett Browning while you’re away.”
“Timothy will think I’ve gone stark raving mad,” Nate groaned, overlooking the fact that she’d promised him nothing.
Two days later, Verity stood on the front porch of the Boone house after dark, calling “Lucky” and “kitty” and “puss-puss” just as she’d been doing for the last two hours. The kitten, who normally kept pretty close to the house, was nowhere to be found. Verity was beside herself with worry—and angry that no one else seemed to care.
Her father stuck his head out the front door. “He’ll come back when he’s ready, Verity. And if he doesn’t, we’ve got plenty of cats living around the barn. Pick another one to pamper and fatten up on cream. Nathaniel won’t care.” Verity shot him a resentful look, both for assuming Nate didn’t care about the kitten he’d given her and for suggesting her pet could be replaced by any barn cat. Ransloe Boone shook his head at her expression and climbed the front stairs to retire for the night.
She called for Lucky again, peering into the dark. She didn’t want to leave him outside all night with bears and bobcats. For all she knew, opossums might eat kittens. There was no use trying to sleep when she was so worried, so she fetched a lantern and started walking down the road toward the woods.
It was only a little after ten o’clock. In Worcester people would still be walking or riding home from social events, their way lit by gas streetlamps. On the Pennsylvania mountainside, however, there was little difference between ten o’clock in the evening and the dead of night. The sky was deep indigo, the trees black against it, and the only thing she could hear besides her footsteps was the rustle of nameless things in the woods. Verity wondered if she would ever be at ease with this isolation. She felt a little like Lucky, small and helpless in a wild world.
It wouldn’t have been so bad in town. Catawissa might not be a city, but she could grow accustomed to its picturesque homes and little shops. For a moment she imagined herself living in a clapboard house with a gable front near the center of town and felt a flicker of cheer. But Nate would never agree to live that far from his property. Verity was marrying a farmer, not a doctor.
She frowned, unhappy that thought had even entered her head. “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” she called. She reached the place where the road divided in two and stopped, reluctant to venture farther. It occurred to her that bears and bobcats might not find a kitten worth their trouble, but a foolhardy city girl would make a tasty meal indeed.
She was about to turn around and head home when she heard a distant meow. “Lucky?” She stood still, listening. A thin, mewing sound answered her. Verity promptly started down the road toward the church, putting bears out of her mind. Was Lucky hurt? This was exactly what she’d feared all day—that he was injured and lying helpless somewhere, unable to come home.
Her sore ankle protested as she descended the hill, and she held the lantern up to light her way, not wanting to turn her foot and injure it all over again. She imagined the embarrassment of appearing a second time at Reverend White’s house, where she would be chastised for another foolish excursion. Every few yards she stopped at the edge of the road and peered into the woods, calling for her cat.
About halfway down the hill she spotted a light near the cemetery—a lantern, if she wasn’t mistaken. Verity paused, wondering if Reverend White had heard her voice and come outside to see what the problem was. But the White house was dark, and this lantern wasn’t moving. Whoever held it was standing still, or else it was resting on the ground outside the cemetery wall.
Verity drew in her breath as she remembered finding her mother’s marker overturned. Was somebody tampering with the graves again? With an unladylike exclamation, she marched the rest of the way down the hill, meaning to surprise the culprit in the act.
When the light near the graveyard went out, she knew she’d been seen. The person and the lantern had both vanished by the time she arrived at the cemetery wall. She looked left and right, glanced over her shou
lder, and peered around the corner of the church. The light proved she hadn’t been alone here a minute ago; but the darkness did not prove she was alone now.
The caged graves cast long, latticed shadows on the ground. She walked around both of them. The doors were closed and padlocked. The stones marking the resting places of her mother and her aunt looked the same as ever, the ground around them unbroken.
Her lantern radiated a circle of light all around her, but on the other side of the low cemetery wall, headstones threw oblong shadows that stretched blindly toward the darkness. She saw no sign of movement and no evidence of mischief, but then her eye was caught by a dim glow in the grass some yards away from Asenath’s grave.
Embers. A few dying embers, growing cold and gray even as she watched. Verity walked over and poked them with the toe of her shoe, smelling the sharp odor of pipe tobacco. Someone had stood here with a lantern a few minutes ago, emptying a pipe. Who would visit a graveyard in the night to smoke a pipe? Verity raised her own light and for the first time saw that there were two other graves outside the cemetery wall, their rectangular stones set flush against the earth and overgrown by grass.
The inscription on the older of the two was worn nearly to illegibility. Verity could make out only the last name, CLAYTON, and a death date beginning with the numbers 17–.
The other was not as old, but strange indeed.
CALEB CLAYTON
1780–1832
STAY PUT NOW
“Begone, you foul creature!” boomed a voice from the darkness.
Stifling a shriek, Verity whirled around. She thrust the lantern in front of her in defense.
Eli Clayton loomed over her, his hair awry, his brow bunched in anger. He held a walking stick in the air as if he was about to strike her with it. She gasped and stepped backward. He watched her, his expression slowly changing from fury to astonishment. “You!” he gasped. “What are you doing here?”
Verity didn’t need to explain her presence to this man. “Who did you think I was?” she countered, her heart pounding.
He clamped his lips shut, but his eyes skittered sideways toward the caged grave of his daughter Asenath. Verity felt a prickle of horror crawl up her spine.
Eli Clayton turned his malevolent gaze back on her and growled, “What are you doing here?”
She glanced down involuntarily at the stones in the ground between them. “Who were these people?” she asked. “Relations of yours?”
“Get out of here!” Clayton snarled, his voice low and angry. “Stay out of my family matters, or worse will befall you than being trampled by a horse!”
He stepped menacingly toward her, and Verity suddenly awakened to her danger. This man had nearly gotten her killed once before. She bolted from the church grounds, taking the hill at a breakneck pace. Shooting pains in her ankle didn’t slow her, nor did the fall of darkness when her lantern blew out. She was gasping for air by the time she reached the top of the hill and staggering by the time she stumbled up the front steps of her father’s house. She locked the front door behind her.
When she reached her bedchamber, she found her mother’s last diary lying on her bed, open to the very same page as before:
Nov 10 – Asenath has it bad too.
Nov 12 – Feeling no better today. Very tired of being so sick.
Nov 14 – Asenath pins her hopes on Miss Piper’s remedies.
Beside the open diary lay the photograph of John and Asenath Thomas.
Verity recoiled. “Who’s doing this?” she cried, turning around and looking at the four walls of her room as if they held some answer. “Why?”
This time she didn’t just think about jamming a chair under the knob of her door.
She did it.
Brisk knocking startled her awake in the morning. Verity leaped out of bed, pushed aside the chair, and threw open the door. Her father was standing in the hallway, holding her kitten in the air by the scruff of his neck. Lucky curled his tail toward his belly and looked repentant.
“Oh!” she cried, reaching out.
Ransloe Boone handed the kitten over. “He was hollering for breakfast at the back door. Lazy thing should be catching his own meals.”
His gruffness didn’t fool Verity at all. “Thank you, Father,” she said, throwing one arm around him and kissing his cheek. He grunted in surprise, and when she stepped back, he left wearing the biggest smile she’d seen on him since she’d come home.
Cuddling the kitten under her chin, she turned to face her room. In the bright morning light, with her pet safely home just as her father had predicted, her fears and fancies of the night before seemed silly. Eli Clayton had frightened her in the cemetery, staring down at her with wild eyes as if she were Asenath out of her grave. But he was crazy; everyone in town knew that. She certainly wouldn’t go walking alone at night again, now that she knew he might be out there.
As for the diary and the photograph left out for her to find—Verity had thrown them both into her mother’s trunk last night and buckled it closed, convinced that Nate was right and she needed to leave the past alone. But what if she wasn’t supposed to leave it alone?
What if that was the message contained in the photograph and the diary?
Her courage rekindled, she set Lucky on the bed. She pulled the trunk’s leather straps free of the buckles and threw open the lid.
Verity reread the final entries of her mother’s last diary, hoping to see something she’d missed. The days leading up to her mother’s death were ordinary and unremarkable. And the final page was heartbreaking. Verity closed that book, puzzled and no more enlightened than before. Then she returned to the one Sarah Ann Boone had written in the summer of 1852 and took up reading from where she’d left off.
Rebecca Clayton’s death had been only one of several that August.
The night of the funeral, other members of the Clayton family sickened, succumbing to the same ailment that had felled Rebecca. And the day after that, Asenath took ill too.
Aug 16 – Mother sent for us at once. Asenath fell ill in the evening—cramps in the stomach and gut. We all knew it was the same thing that has taken her family, even though we did not want to say it.
Dire stomach pains followed by lethargy and stupor resulted in the death of Rebecca’s grandmother, a baby, and an aunt, and the Thomases feared for Asenath’s life.
Every person in this town with the name of Clayton has fallen to it. What nature of illness can pick out people by their name? It is no wonder people are remembering the stories about a curse on that poor wretched family!
Verity’s mother didn’t think it was a matter of contagion. Asenath had not visited her family home since the day of Rebecca’s death.
On August 17, the entry read:
Heart beats slow. She waters from the eyes, nose, and mouth. Chokes if we lay her down. She is very sleepy, but we are afraid to let her sleep. Those who died fell into a stupor before they passed.
Sarah Ann Boone’s hands had shaken as she wrote those words.
However, later that evening, she wrote:
There is no more drool and her heartbeat is stronger. I dared not write it before, but praise the Lord, I think she will live.
The following day’s entry reported:
Asenath is much better today, John is prostrate with exhaustion and relief, and Mother broke down and repented of every unkind thing she has ever said. Ransloe took us down to church to pray, where we heard disturbing gossip from town. Sometimes I cannot credit what ignorant people will stoop to believing.
Verity wondered what the townsfolk had been saying, but her mother did not record it. I heard it again today, and it is not worth repeating, she wrote on August 19.
And then, on August 20:
When I heard about Rebecca’s grave being opened last night, I ran from the room and emptied my stomach. What has the world come to? How could anyone desecrate the dead in such a vile manner?
There it was. Verity could draw only one con
clusion—this was the incident her father had mentioned. Rebecca Clayton’s grave had been robbed, her body stolen and sold to medical students.
Verity closed the diary. An illness that took only Claytons? Ignorant gossip in town and pillaged graves?
If she wanted to know what had really happened in the summer and fall of 1852, she was going to have to seek more information from people who liked to gossip and tell stories, even when it wasn’t prudent to do so.
Nineteen
“CARRIE,” VERITY ventured, eyeing Nate’s sister over her cup of tea, “I was at the cemetery yesterday, and I realized that there are two other graves outside the wall. One of them has the strangest inscription . . .”
Carrie’s blue eyes twinkled. “I’ll bet you mean the Clayton stones.”
Annie and Carrie had been delighted to receive Verity’s calling card and promptly invited her for afternoon tea. They welcomed her in the family library, a much cozier room than the front parlor, where Verity had looked through countless issues of Godey’s with Mrs. McClure. The sisters expressed regrets from Hattie, who was unable to join them. The youngest McClure sister was nursing her husband, whose war injury had flared up.
“Yes, those two,” Verity agreed, smiling as if her interest in the subject were only a passing fancy. “I said to myself, if anyone knows the story, Carrie will.”
“She does indeed.” Annie sniffed with mock disapproval. “It’s her favorite story after the Battle of Wyoming.”
The Caged Graves Page 12
