Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “Was it a frightening ghost, Daddy?” wondered Emily, her eyes wide, and her shoulders slightly hunched with expectation.

  Dr. Moriarty glanced at his wife, who had chided him in the past for speaking carelessly before their daughters. It was a certain flaw of his to voice an honest wonder about any subject occupying his mind, regardless of company. Now he realized that the present topic of conversation was not, perhaps, conducive to pleasant dreams in young children.

  “No, dear,” said the father, “I couldn’t say for sure that it was a ghost at all. Mister Walton is quite right in considering it an interesting experience without wholly accepting it for what it seemed.”

  “Believe none of what you hear,” said Mary, “and only half of what you see.” Her smile was ironic and indicated that she herself was not to be taken with complete seriousness.

  “But were you frightened?” wondered Aria.

  “No, dear,” said Dr. Moriarty. “It was a strangely comforting vision. Wouldn’t you say, Mister Walton?”

  “Oh, yes, I would indeed.” And it was, he thought, strangely comforting for an apparition that had raised the hair at the back of his neck.

  “Mommy has seen a ghost,” said Emily, and now it was Mary’s turn to be caught out.

  “Has she?” said the doctor, returning to his breakfast with his tongue in his cheek.

  “Well,” explained Mary. “They wanted a ghost story last Christmas.”

  “Ah, yes! The prisoner of war.” The doctor patted Emily’s head.

  “Mommy saw him in the garden,” Aria informed Mister Walton.

  “My goodness!” said the portly fellow, unable to resist a quick glance through the window at his shoulder. The gardens of the Moriartys’ backyard looked all too cheerful and sunny to harbor a specter.

  “Not our garden, Mister Walton,” said the doctor. “This was at Mary’s family home.”

  “Oh, I see.” The older gentleman was a little sorry to have exhibited such obvious curiosity.

  “Another phantom of the War of 1812, it seems. You shouldn’t keep our guest in the dark, my dear.” Dr. Moriarty was pleased to have been let off the hook for his own indiscretion.

  “Oh-ho!” laughed Mister Walton.

  Mary smiled slyly at her husband’s conspicuous motive for encouraging her story. “It may prove a dull experience to tell, Mister Walton, compared to your encounter last night.”

  “Told by you, Mrs. Moriarty, I am sure that it could not be dull.” Mister Walton spoke with complete sincerity, and would have appeared courtly even if he had said this merely to be polite.

  Mrs. Moriarty was not a beautiful woman—her features were a little too strong to be considered comely—but her smile was always true, and she had fine hazel eyes that shone with an attractive intelligence. Mister Walton, who had a natural sympathy for women, liked her very much.

  “Mommy thinks the ghost was in love,” said Aria, her face solemn.

  “He did fit a particular historical description, it is true,” said the mother. “But my suspicions concerning his identity are only a whimsical conjecture. Please, Mister Walton, do continue your breakfast.” She sipped from her coffee with the air of an orator wetting her lips for a speech.

  “My family is from Wiscasset,” she said. “My father was a merchant captain and his father also. My mother, in fact, was a daughter of a captain, so my being land bound, you see, is only an accident of my sex.” She flashed a look at her husband. “The house in which I grew up was smaller in my grandfather’s day, but there were beautiful gardens dating back to his time. My grandfather’s sister, Cressida—Aunt Cressy, I called her—tended them till the day she died, when I was thirteen years old. She never married, and though she was very kind to me and my brothers and sisters, the gardens took most of her time during the warm months, and occupied most of her thoughts during the cold.

  “She seemed to derive little pleasure from the gardens, however—they were an occupation, almost an obsession, though I must admit I never thought very much about this side of her character till after she was gone.

  “The year after she died Aunt Cressy’s gardens saw little attention and as summer came to an end the flowering bushes needed trimming, the roses needed pruning. The annuals had never been planted that spring and their usual beds were suddenly the home of weeds and grass. It distressed me to see her beautiful gardens gone to seed; it was too much like forgetting Aunt Cressy herself, and I determined to remedy the situation with my own two hands when spring came around again.”

  Mary had warmed to her tale now, and far from finding it dull, Mister Walton was as charmed with what his hostess told him as with the natural grace with which she told it. She was gazing at her own gardens now, and it was obvious to him that she was looking out at roses and flowerbeds that he could not see.

  “I spent a great deal of the following winter planning the resurrection of Aunt Cressy’s garden, and when spring arrived I went to work, begrudging every day of rain, and wishing that I had paid more attention to my aunt’s horticultural gifts when she might have passed them on to me. I don’t think I had the natural talent for flowers that she had, and I certainly didn’t have the experience, but as summer leafed out, the garden took on something of its old life.

  “My father was away most of that season; he was at sea a great deal, of course, when I was a child. My mother was not well then, and she seemed to enjoy the garden from her sickroom window, so it seemed to me that there was double purpose in my labors. My brothers and sisters took no interest, however, and I spent much of that summer—my fourteenth—alone with the primroses and daylilies.

  “It was early in August, on one of those mornings when the heat of the previous day has never been fully dissipated by the night between. The garden was still, almost breathless, damp in the humid air and heavy with the scent of its own flowers. The bees and the early cicadas created a wash of monotonous sound that was pleasant, almost dreamy, to hear. I had been watching a cluster of shoots among the nasturtiums for some days, and recently decided they were weeds, so I was down on my knees in my best sun hat and working gloves, when I distinctly heard my aunt’s name spoken aloud.

  “My first response was simple surprise, and I merely straightened up without a thought to turn and see who had spoken. Then the voice came again. ‘Cressida,’ it said: a man’s voice filled with such warmth and longing that I blushed, as if I myself had been called by someone who loved me in the most hopeless and romantic way.

  “And then I did turn. And I can’t say that I was frightened or even very shocked to see a tall, rather handsome man, dressed in the uniform of a British naval officer, but a uniform that had not been seen in practical use for years. He stood at the other end of the garden, and his eyes, I thought, might drink me in, they were that expressive of love and devotion. Tears sprang to my own eyes, I was so struck by the force of his emotion.

  “He was more shocked to see me, I think, for a strange cloud fell across his expression, and as I tried to squint my tears away—quite actually in the blink of an eye—he was gone. And I stumbled over to the bench where my aunt had spent so many waking hours watching her beautiful garden, and I wept as if I had lost my most beloved friend.”

  There were tears, even now, in Mary Moriarty’s eyes as she spoke; Mister Walton felt himself misting up, and he doffed his spectacles to brush at his closed eyelids. “This was an apparition, then,” he said.

  “Yes. It seemed so to my eyes—and to my heart.”

  Mister Walton put his glasses on again and blinked. He had forgotten where he was, for a moment, and he looked around to see that Mary’s family was not unmoved by her tale, though they had heard it before. Her daughters were filled with honest wonder, but Dr. Moriarty watched his wife with a seriousness and a love that might have been the picture of that phantom’s own passionate expression. “Was this the ghost of some lost love of your aunt’s?” wondered the guest.

  “It was my first and only opinion on the
matter,” said Mary.

  “There is a sequel to this story,” said the doctor.

  “Oh, my goodness!” said Mister Walton. It was almost too much to hope for. “Did you see him again?”

  “I didn’t,” said Mary. “But my mother did.”

  “Oh, dear me! And she was ill, you say.”

  “Yes. In fact, I had no intention of saying anything to her about what I had seen. She was actually on the mend by the beginning of August, but I feared that she would fret either over this presence on the property if she believed me, or over my state of mind if she didn’t. I realized that this man I had seen must be someone from my aunt Cressy’s girlhood, and that I would have to wait patiently for my father’s return to inquire about him—if indeed my father would know anything.

  “But it was my mother who brought up the subject, for the next day she fell asleep in her chair in her room, and woke in the late afternoon to find the very same figure—by her description—standing in the doorway, with the look of someone who is on a profound search. She said there was something purposeful in his gaze, as if he himself had only just wakened to some new truth. And when she spoke to him, he was gone.

  “ ‘Mary,’ my mother said, ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t spend so much time in the garden. Your aunt, I think, kept it for her own reasons, and maybe those reasons need to rest.’

  “So I abandoned the garden, left the flowers to the encroachment of weeds, and hardly walked there. For a while I felt as if I had betrayed a trust, but I was fourteen, and in late August I went to a church picnic at Fort Edgecomb, where I met Patrick. I was very young.” Mary gave each of her daughters a deliberate look. “And I saw your father only rarely the next two years, but I was also very much in love, and I began to think less about Aunt Cressy’s garden and the apparition that my mother and I had seen.”

  Mister Walton was absolutely overflowing with curiosity by now, and waited upon Mary’s every word.

  “By the time my father came home, late in September,” she continued, “I had decided not to say anything about the man in the garden. The memory had grown unreal, just as your memory of last night, Mister Walton. I willingly stayed away from the garden as fall approached, and half-believed that what I had seen had been a product of my self-imposed loneliness there. It was my father who raised the subject, one unseasonably cold night, when he had built a fire in the parlor.

  “Mother, still not fully recovered from her illness, had retired early, and Daddy and I each had our nose in a book, when I sensed from the corner of my eye that he had set down his reading to watch the fire. ‘There was a reason, you know,’ he said without preamble, ‘why your Aunt Cressida never married.’

  “I said I had often wondered, and he thought it remarkable that I had never been told. My mother, for some reason, was always a little quiet about family things.

  “ ‘Your aunt was in love once, you see. She was only sixteen, I think—years before I was born. Her brother—your grandfather—was first mate aboard a privateer, the Thomas, and in May of 1813 they captured two British vessels, the ship Diana and the brig John Peate. The Thomas was out of Portsmouth, but there were several Wiscasset men aboard her, and since these vessels were captured not far from the mouth of the Sheepscott, the captain was induced to give his Maine men an extra measure of glory by delivering the captured vessels and crews to the Wiscasset dockside.’

  “The commanding officer of the Diana, my father told me, was Captain Solomon Jennings, a gallant sort of gentleman, and he and the captain of the John Peate were given their parole, a standard practice in those days. Officers, when captured, were often allowed to roam within the town of their confinement, if they would simply give their word not to attempt escape. Captain Jennings gave his word, along with the other officer, and they were granted their freedom as far as the limits of the town.

  “Then one evening, Captain Jennings was invited to my grandfather’s for dinner, and it was there that he met my grandfather’s younger sister, my aunt Cressida. She was barely sixteen years old, but already thought of as the most beautiful young woman in town. This reputation had not gone to her head, I’ve been told; an elderly friend of my father’s had once told him that she had been as beautiful to know as to look at.

  “Well, Captain Jennings had sailed the world and fought in a dozen naval conflicts, but he was not prepared for Cressida, and he fell like a great towering oak. You could hear the crash, they said.

  “Things were different then; they might be at war with Captain Jennings, but that didn’t mean they had to dislike him. Cressida’s family did not stand in the way of these two spending time together—always at the family home and always, when weather permitted, in the garden.

  “But a dilemma arose between Cressida and Captain Jennings. They were deeply in love by the end of June; barely a month had passed. Captain Jennings got word that an exchange of prisoners had been agreed upon, and that he and his men were to be sent home under the stipulation that they not sail American waters for three years. Solomon Jennings was beside himself. He had two choices and he knew that he could not live with either of them.

  “The first was to return to England and, at best, not see Cressida for three years. It was an impossibility, he said. The second was to renounce his loyalty to the British Crown and Navy—equally untenable.

  “So Captain Jennings devised a third desperate plan of action. He would break his parole, escape to Boston, where he was sure he could arrange secret passage, then return to Wiscasset for an elopement. Explaining his plot to Cressida, he promised to return. ‘I swear to you,’ he said, ‘on my love, I swear, that I shall meet you again in this very garden.’

  Mary interrupted her story, saying, “Your coffee is growing cold, Mister Walton.”

  “Oh, no, no,” he said, and took a quick sip from his cup. It was indeed lukewarm, but he did not want her to take time away from her story to fill it. “It’s fine, really it is. But Captain Jennings? He never returned, then.”

  “Oh, yes, Mister Walton, he certainly did—and many times, I think. But he was caught almost at once, you see, in Portsmouth—a British sailor out of uniform.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “They hanged him, of course, and official word of his death did not reach Wiscasset for several months. But it was only a week after his escape, the story has it, that he fulfilled his promise and met Aunt Cressy in the garden. Grandfather found her in a dead faint and she was unconscious for three days. It was during her convalescence from this tragedy that she began to tend the garden herself, coaxing buds from the soil, and filling the backyard with the most beautiful blooms the town had ever known. You could smell their fragrance all up and down the street.

  “And every summer Captain Jennings’ soul, like a butterfly, was drawn by those flowers, and their fragrance, and the work of his beloved’s hands, to repeat the fulfillment of his vow.”

  “I have traveled in every state of the Union,” said Mister Walton, “and never stopped to think that there was so much to see, and so many stories to hear in the very state that gave me birth.”

  “Between the Dash and Captain Jennings,” said the doctor, “it does give one something to think about.” They were in the Moriartys’ own garden now, strolling among the roses and the philodendrons.

  “But really, I have been remiss,” said Mister Walton. “This Fort Edgecomb that you mentioned—I take it, since you were picnicking on its grounds, that the military no longer occupies it.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mary. “Not for years. It was decommissioned, I think, soon after peace was reached with the British.”

  “It’s not a very large affair,” said Dr. Moriarty. “Just a simple blockhouse, really, across the Sheepscott River from Wiscasset. It looks a bit like Fort McClary at Kittery Point. The stockade is gone, but the gun emplacements are still visible.”

  “Well, I’ve heard of it, but never seen it.”

  “It’s quite handsomely situated,” said Mary, “as most fo
rts are; the point being to command an important view.”

  “Really, I must appear quite ignorant.”

  “Not in the least, Mister Walton. On the contrary, you seem remarkably well traveled.”

  “But not in my own home, Mrs. Moriarty.” Mister Walton brought his portly figure to a halt and his hosts stopped on either side of him. He clasped his hands behind him and regarded the top of an elm tree. “Yes, it shall be remedied,” he said, and it was clear to the Moriartys that he was speaking to himself as much as to them. “Since returning home, fate has gently nudged me from one pleasant or extraordinary encounter to the next. I have let the winds of whim take me where they will, these past few days, and I have not been disappointed. Now I feel the suggestion of Fort Edgecomb coming upon me, and who knows what I shall discover there.”

  “You are an adventurer, Mister Walton,” said Mary with a quiet smile.

  “My dear sister is in Africa with her missionary husband. That, I think, qualifies as adventure. No, Mrs. Moriarty, I claim no bravery—only curiosity. I do love to meet new people, and see new sights.”

  Dr. Moriarty had moved a few paces ahead of them and was admiring a blossom with his nose. The girls appeared around the corner of the house, playing tag. Mary took Mister Walton’s arm and with the doctor they recommenced their saunter through the garden.

  “Did you ever see the captain again?” asked Mister Walton. “Captain Jennings?”

  “I never did,” said Mary. “I think he must have gone over to the other side, Mister Walton, once he realized that his love was waiting for him there.”

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