Verity lowered her hand. “A mistake?”
“Sometimes people mistake water hemlock for parsnips, but I think the simplest answer is the same thing that almost got you. Mountain laurel would have caused those symptoms—and so would rhododendron, which grows all over this area.”
“Are you saying someone mistook mountain laurel for something else?” Verity hadn’t known the flowers were poisonous, but she thought the people who grew up here must know it.
Jones shook his head. “Probably not. I’ve never heard of anyone except small children—and very nearly you—eating nectar from mountain laurel. But in a very dry summer, bees sometimes make honey from mountain laurel and rhododendron, if there’s nothing else available.”
Verity stared at him incredulously. “Honey?”
“It can be very dangerous. In the first century B.C., an entire Roman legion was poisoned by honey made from rhododendron,” Jones told her. “It led to a rather famous Roman defeat. Careful beekeepers know the signs to watch out for, but the Claytons aren’t careful people. You remember your mother thought Rebecca Clayton had been stung by bees? Well, August was honey-gathering season.”
“You think Rebecca ate poisoned honey?”
“Or baked it into something. I spoke to Eli Clayton just yesterday. He doesn’t remember if Rebecca was baking the day she fell ill, but he admits she used to gather wild honey, and she had a real sweet tooth.” Jones shook his head regretfully. “From what I read in your mother’s diary, I suspect Rebecca baked honey cakes, which were served the day of her funeral—poisoning the rest of the family, including your aunt Asenath.”
Verity shuddered. Her parents had been offered those cakes, but Eli Clayton had behaved so unpleasantly, they’d left without eating any. Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked furiously, trying to hold them back.
Jones stood up, plucked a handkerchief from his coat, and offered it to her. She buried her face in it gratefully, and he laid a hand on her shoulder.
“They didn’t all die from it,” she said.
“The two adults who died were already in poor health, and the third victim was a baby. Other family members were similarly afflicted but recovered, as did Asenath. Of course,” Jones went on, “Eli Clayton has his own explanation for what happened. Would you believe he laughed at mine—preferring to believe in curses?”
Verity raised her face from the handkerchief. “But my mother died three months later!”
“You can put honey up in jars and save it.” His voice was kind but logical. “You can take it out three months later and bake with it . . . or give it away. It’s the most reasonable explanation I can think of for a second episode of poisoning so soon after the first.”
She stood up, clutching the arm of the chair for support. “Verity,” he murmured, and she stepped into his arms.
He wasn’t as tall as Nate. His shoulder was the perfect height to cry on, and she did. For several long minutes, he simply held her while she sobbed out her grief over something so foolish that did so much harm.
“It was an accident.” His breath rustled her hair. “I thought about lying to you—telling you it was some rare illness . . .”
“No. I’m glad you didn’t. I don’t like lies.” Verity didn’t lie to herself about what would happen when she lifted her head from his shoulder and tipped it back to look at him.
Hadley Jones kissed her.
She didn’t think; she made a conscious effort not to think. His arms tightened around her waist, pressing her body against his. She’d felt his strength before, and she succumbed to his power willingly, just as she had in the Shades. He was bold and forceful, not gentle or playful like . . .
Verity put a hand on his chest and held him back, blinking at him in confusion. Sky-blue eyes met hers. “Do you love him?” Hadley Jones demanded.
Of all the things he could have asked, he drove unerringly at her greatest doubt.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
He nodded. “I can live with that.” He tightened his grip and kissed her again. Her backside hit the arm of the settee, and she braced herself with one hand, lest they tumble onto it together.
Heavy footfalls sounded above. “Jones!” The bellowing voice reverberated through the ceiling, followed by footsteps on the front staircase. “What’s all that shouting in the street?”
“It’s Independence Day!” Hadley Jones barked. “You drunken bungler . . .” The last was muttered under his breath as he turned back to Verity, but she’d already withdrawn from him, the spell broken. Her eyes were riveted on the stairs in the front hall as a large, menacing figure appeared.
“No!” snapped Dr. Robbins. “Someone’s been hurt, you fool boy!”
The fireworks had stopped. Verity pushed Jones aside in sudden terror. “Nate!”
The front door burst open as though kicked. Two men dragged a limp body into the house, their injured companion’s arms thrown across their shoulders.
He was unconscious, his feet dragging on the ground. Blood stained his shirt and matted his dark hair. His face was so lacerated and swollen, he was barely recognizable. But Verity knew him at once.
It was John Thomas.
“Get him to the examining room!” Dr. Robbins ordered, pointing the way through the house. Hadley Jones dashed from the parlor in their wake.
Verity snatched up her mother’s diaries, then hesitated, uncertain whether she should follow after her uncle or get out of the doctors’ way. Guilt for having nearly been caught in the parlor with Hadley Jones—for what they’d been doing—made up her mind and drove her out of the house.
The women and children who’d been watching the fireworks were now heading home as fast as their feet and carriages could carry them. An angry mob of men milled in the street outside the doctor’s house. Shouted questions overlapped attempted answers.
“His boys found him . . .”
“ . . . anyone know how long he’s been there . . . ?”
“ . . . unconscious behind Dyers . . .”
“Was he robbed . . . ?”
Verity listened to the tangled accounts with growing horror. Darting forward, she grabbed a nearby man by the arm. “Where’s the sheriff? I know who’s responsible!”
When she’d had her scare in the alley, had her uncle been lying unconscious a few feet away? Had he been abandoned there, bleeding and alone, while she was in the house with Hadley Jones?
The man whose arm she held stared at her blankly for a moment, then his eyes grew wide in recognition. “You’re Miss Boone! Why, Nathaniel’s looking for you!” Catching her wrist with one hand, he dragged her down the street. “Where’s Nathaniel?” he hollered. “Tell him I’ve found his girl!”
“Listen to me!” Verity cried. “I can describe the man who hurt my uncle!”
Manhandled and thrust through the crowd, Verity found herself passed along, her protests unregarded, until she landed in a familiar embrace.
“Verity! Where have you been?”
“Nate! No one will listen to me! I know who did this!”
“I’ll listen to you.” Nate and Verity turned as one at the sound of the voice. Not nearly as tall as Nate, the bristly, gray-haired sheriff exuded an air of aggression. He glowered at Verity, his eyebrows crunched into an arrow between his eyes. “Who assaulted Mr. Thomas?”
Verity described the incident with Piper in the woods and her own encounter with the scarred man in the alley. She told the sheriff what she’d seen of him by the light of the fireworks and how a second man in the shadows had called him away.
“Verity!” Nate exclaimed, his face clouded with outrage and worry.
The sheriff squinted at her as if he didn’t believe her. “What did you do, Miss Boone, after being frightened so badly? Why didn’t you raise an alarm?”
She dared not look at Nate. “I went into the doctor’s house.”
Nate’s hand tightened on her arm, and she winced. But the sheriff was not satisfied. “Dr. Robbins was not
concerned about thugs grabbing young ladies off the street?”
Verity clasped her mother’s diaries to her chest. “Dr. Jones said it was probably someone who’d had too much to drink at the tavern.”
Nate let go of her arm. Verity turned toward him, but the sheriff commanded her attention. “What did the second man in the alley say, exactly? About the wrong girl?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember . . .”
“John Thomas has a daughter. Where is she?”
Verity gasped, horrified. She hadn’t given a single thought to who the right girl was.
“Liza Thomas went home with her mother hours ago, as far as I know,” Nate said.
The sheriff nodded grimly. “Nathaniel, can I ask you to look in at the Thomas house, make sure everyone there is all right?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“And take this bunch with you.” The sheriff pointed to the boys huddled in the street near Dr. Robbins’s front steps. Johnny Thomas held a twin under each arm, and Piper squatted at his feet, freckled face screwed up in a fruitless attempt to ward off tears.
“Boys!” Verity opened her arms, and the three younger children launched themselves toward her. She wrapped herself about them, holding their shivering bodies close against her own. “We’re going to take you home,” she told them, glancing up at Nate.
Avoiding her eyes, he muttered that he was going to fetch his horse and wagon and strode off.
Johnny stepped forward. “I’m not going home. I’ll stay with my father.”
Verity nodded at him over Piper’s head. “Go inside and don’t let anybody remove you until you see Dr. Jones. Tell him I said you could stay and sit by your father.”
The boy nodded back at her solemnly like a young gentleman—and then burst into tears. When Verity reached out to him, Johnny took a shuddering breath, straightened his back, and marched into the doctor’s office.
Twenty-Six
LAMPS IN nearly every window lit up the Thomas house like a beacon. Verity didn’t think that was a good sign, and Nate swore softly under his breath. When the boys made a move to scramble out of the wagon, he grabbed the nearest one and held him back. “Wait here!” He climbed down and started up the front walkway without another word.
Nate hadn’t spoken to Verity at all during the ride from town. She knew he was furious, and with Hadley Jones’s kisses burning on her lips, she figured he had even more right to be than he knew.
The front door banged open and Clara Thomas emerged. Verity was shocked to see her aunt haul a shotgun onto her shoulder and cock it with a resounding snap. “Who’s that?” Aunt Clara hollered.
“It’s Nathaniel, Mrs. Thomas! I’ve got your boys with me!”
Verity watched Nate and Aunt Clara meet halfway along the path and exchange a volley of quick words. Then movement in the doorway caught her eye, and Liza stepped onto the front porch. The surge of relief Verity felt, seeing her cousin unharmed, surprised her.
Nate looked back and beckoned with his hand. Verity shooed the boys before her. “Two men tried to force their way into the house,” Nate said to her quietly as the children ran past him toward their sister.
Verity turned to her aunt. “Was anyone hurt?”
“I hope so.” Aunt Clara coolly uncocked the shotgun. “If not, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Where’s Johnny?”
“I left him at the doctor’s,” Verity said. “He wanted to stay by his father’s side.”
Aunt Clara nodded approvingly. “About time that boy grew a backbone.”
“Mrs. Thomas, I’m going to take Verity home, and then I’ll fetch my brothers-in-law and come back.” Nate looked out into the darkness worriedly. “We won’t leave you here alone tonight.”
They were back in the wagon and halfway between the two houses when Verity could stand it no longer. “Are you going to say nothing to me at all?”
“Do you really think this is the time to talk about it?” It sounded as if his teeth were clenched.
“No,” she admitted, but to her surprise, Nate wrenched the horse to a stop and pivoted in his seat to face her.
“Do you want to break off our engagement?”
She gasped. “No!”
“A man threatened you tonight, and you ran to Jones! I was right there on the street launching fireworks—don’t tell me you couldn’t find me!”
“I didn’t run to him! He found me and took me inside, and then . . .” She raised the notebooks from her lap.
“Oh, the diaries! I should have known!”
Verity glared at Nate. “He told me why my mother died. Don’t you care?”
Nate shook his head angrily. “Not as much as I care about Jones using the matter as an excuse to be alone with you.”
She slammed the notebooks down on her lap, furious.
Nate wasn’t finished. “What feelings do you have for your good friend Jones?”
Verity looked up at him defiantly. “I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t comfort me much.” Nate picked up the reins, then flung them down again. “I think you’d better decide,” he growled. “I’ll leave it to you. If you want to be released from our agreement, then tell me.”
“You’re leaving it up to me? If you doubt me, why don’t you call it off yourself? Is it because my land is too important to you?”
“Is that what you think?” He laughed outright, without much humor. “If I wanted to marry a girl for her fine acreage, there’s plenty in this township who’d be a lot less trouble to court than you, Verity Boone!”
“Then why don’t you go pick one of them?”
“Because I love you, you senseless girl!” He moved so suddenly, she flinched. But he just slid across the seat until she was pressed against the side of the wagon. “I love you ‘to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,’” he said, his voice pitched low and urgent. “Freely, purely, with a passion—‘with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life’—”
She stared at him in surprise. “I thought you said you didn’t understand that poem.”
“I understand it now,” Nate replied. “I daresay I understand it better than you do.”
Looking up at him, Verity thought he was probably right.
Slowly, Nate eased back to his place, picked up the reins once more, and urged the horse onward. Verity hunched her shoulders and clasped her hands in her lap, prepared to finish the ride in the same unhappy silence with which they’d begun it.
He stopped the wagon in front of the Boone house and didn’t offer to help her down. After a moment she climbed out by herself. She didn’t know what to say to him. There was only one thing he wanted to hear from her, and she couldn’t speak the words. She folded her arms over the diaries, clasping them to her breast.
“If you don’t know what you want,” he said, “do me the favor of cutting me off. I don’t want to marry a girl who doesn’t love me back.”
In spite of his anger, Nate did not leave Verity unprotected. By the time she’d woken her father and told him what had happened, Annie’s husband was knocking on the front door. Nate had dropped him off to help Ransloe Boone protect his household before driving with Carrie’s husband back to the Thomas home.
Beulah fired up the stove. A massive manhunt had been organized; the citizens of Catawissa were beating the fields and woods and swamplands, looking for the men who’d assaulted John Thomas and tried to force their way into his house.
While Verity and Beulah worked side by side to fuel the searchers with bread and meat, news of the evening’s events trickled in bit by bit. Clara Thomas might have filled one offender’s backside with buckshot, but he was still able-bodied enough to flee before she could deliver more.
The assault on the house had come mere minutes after the last farm worker had left the Thomas property for the day. Some people assumed that the Pooles were in collusion with the villains, and others concluded that the house had been under close observation for some time.
It had taken seventeen stitches to repair John Thomas’s face, but common opinion reckoned that a little less handsomeness wouldn’t hurt him. He’d also been hit pretty hard in the head, which might account for how little he remembered of the attack and why he couldn’t tell them a single thing about the men who’d done it.
Piper and the twins were unable to provide an adequate description of the men who’d frightened them in the woods three weeks ago. After furious debate, they agreed that one was “very ugly” and the other was “not as ugly.”
No one got any sleep that night, and by afternoon of the next day Beulah suggested that Verity go upstairs and lie down. Too weary and heartsick to argue, she climbed the stairs and undressed. As she took down her hair, she eyed her mother’s trunk.
So now she knew. Her mother had been suffering from nothing more serious than pregnancy. Someone had brought her a special treat or homemade remedy for nausea. And her mother, kind soul that she was, had shared it with poor Asenath, a girl too ignorant to be sure she even was pregnant and who tried to ward off evil with little bags of herbs and flowers. In fact, Verity realized, the poison might even have come from Asenath herself. She might have mistaken one of her charm ingredients for something that belonged in a soup.
Hadley Jones was right. It had been a tragic accident.
Verity lay back on her bed. Thinking about him made her miserable. Remembering her inexcusable behavior, she was embarrassed; she’d been raised better than that. And what was she going to do about Nate? She lifted her hand to examine, for perhaps the five thousandth time, the ring on her finger.
Last night Nate had fed Barrett Browning’s poem to her like medicine on a spoon—not reciting it by rote, but quoting from it forcefully, ardently.
He knew what that poem meant, and she didn’t.
She didn’t know if she was in love with either one of them. Attracted to both of them in different ways, yes—but how, at seventeen, was she supposed to recognize love? Wasn’t it supposed to be obvious? Shouldn’t she feel it in every breath and heartbeat?
The Caged Graves Page 17
