Harvest of Secrets

by Ellen Crosby

  There had to be someone else who was just as angry with Jean-Claude, or even angrier, someone who lost control in a moment of fury and stabbed him to death.

  Kit leaned back against the leather banquette, watching me. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you’re actually worried Dominique did it? Is that what’s going on?”

  That was the $64,000 question, wasn’t it? Our waitress had already returned with our iced teas.

  After she left I said, “No, of course not. Dominique didn’t do it. She just … she can’t have.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.” Kit gave me a pointed look as she sucked her tea through her straw.

  I stirred my own tea and watched the ice cubes swirl around. “I’m afraid she might have enough reasons, enough of a motive—and no alibi for the time Jean-Claude was killed—for Bobby to make a case that she did stab him to death.”

  Kit reached over and covered her hand with mine. “Bobby’s not going to accuse someone of murder just so he can wrap things up with a bow and get the State Department and the press off his back.” Her voice was quiet, but firm. “Even one as high-profile as this one. He won’t stop until he finds out who really did it and there’s not a shadow of a doubt in his mind about that person’s guilt. Okay?”

  “I suppose so … yes.”

  Our food arrived. Kit attacked her Reuben with gusto, but as good as it was, I picked at my salad.

  “We need to talk about something else. Tell me why we’re going to the Balch Library,” Kit said in her usual blunt way, dabbing her mouth with her napkin. “And eat your salad, kiddo. You’ll waste away to nothing.”

  I picked up my fork, dug in, and told her everything. Susanna Montgomery, Charles, the engagement, his marriage to Thelma’s great-aunt, Susanna’s interest in Quakerism, and finally about Henry Wells and Rejoice. When I was done I got Henry’s photograph out of my purse and handed it to her.

  She took a look at it and whistled. “Wow, isn’t he the handsome devil.”

  “I’d like to find out who he was,” I said. “And what happened to him.”

  “The Balch is the perfect place. Anything you want to know about the history of Leesburg, Loudoun County, and all the surrounding areas is there. They have loads of Civil War documents. A few years ago they were designated as a reference site for the Underground Railroad.”

  She passed Henry Wells’ photograph back to me and my heart skipped a beat. “The Underground Railroad? Really?”

  “Yup,” she said through a mouthful of Reuben. When she was done chewing she added, “What do you think happened to Susanna Montgomery? How did she die? Do you think Charles did her in because he found out about her and Henry?”

  That question still made me squirm. Kit, the journalist, never beat around the bush. Did one of my cousins murder another cousin? Yes or no?

  “I don’t know. Yasmin said the cuff link she found in the grave almost certainly belonged to whoever dug it. So Charles buried her, at least. Whether he did her in … killed her…” I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. The whole thing is pretty sordid if he did.”

  “It is, but you can’t control what did or didn’t happen one hundred and fifty years ago. You’re not responsible for the actions of other people, even if they are related to you.”

  “My family owned slaves, Kit. Susanna’s father was one of Mosby’s Rangers. To have his daughter fall in love with a black man in those days was probably the worst thing she could do to disgrace her family. The Montgomery family. My family.”

  “Lucie, a lot of people in Middleburg and Leesburg owned slaves. Today it sounds absolutely heinous and unthinkable that someone—anyone—could be considered the property of another person, bought and sold like … like animals or farm equipment … just because of the color of their skin. But it happened. The times, the beliefs, and people’s values were different, and you can’t make it unhappen,” she said. “I did some research on Bobby’s family after we got married. Do you know what I found out? His ancestors owned a place called Noland’s Tavern in Middleburg. They used to hold auctions where they sold slaves. Families. Men, women, children. I found a copy of a poster advertising one of the sales. It turned my stomach.”

  I set down my fork. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Neither did I. But it is what it is. All you can hope—all any of us can hope—is that we learn from the past. Do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  I nodded, unconvinced. The world wasn’t that simple a place. We both knew it.

  “Come on, Luce. I hate to see you look so melancholy,” she said. Then she brightened. “How about dessert? We could both do with something sweet.”

  In Kit’s world food equaled comfort and love. The fixer of all maladies, especially if it involved sugar. Or chocolate. I smiled and said, “Sure.”

  “I think we should each get a homemade ice cream cone. I already asked the waitress before you arrived what the flavor of the day is. It’s honey lavender.”

  “The chef made honey lavender ice cream? I’m in.”

  I paid for lunch and Kit and I ate our ice cream cones walking the two and a half blocks down West Market Street to the Thomas Balch Library. Like Lightfoot, the library was located in the historic district of Leesburg. It had been built in 1922 and looked more like an elegant redbrick colonial home than a library, with its columned portico, cupola, and two wings flanking either side of the main building, much like Highland House. Originally it had been a subscription-only library until 1960 when it had become a free—but segregated—public library. Desegregation came in 1965. I thought about David—or more accurately, David’s birth mother—and tried to imagine what it would have felt like, perhaps as a teenager, for her to be turned away and told to find someplace else to do her research because she wasn’t white.

  “You’re kind of quiet,” Kit said, finishing the last bite of her homemade waffle cone.

  “Just thinking.”

  The everyday entrance was around the back, another columned portico that was slightly less grand than the front entrance. Inside the library was light-filled and airy, a series of large, open rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining the walls. It reminded me of the home of an erudite scholar, with paintings on the walls, fireplaces, comfortable chairs for sitting and reading, and long rectangular conference tables with Windsor chairs pulled around them, a place for spreading out papers and getting work done. All that was missing was the butler and a silver tray with glasses of sherry.

  A pleasant-faced woman with short blond hair, clear blue eyes behind librarian horn-rimmed glasses, and a lanyard with a photo ID hanging around her neck smiled at Kit and me from a seat behind the circulation desk when we walked in. “Katherine Noland.” She stood up. “How nice to see you again. It’s been a while.”

  Kit smiled. “It’s nice to see you, too, Ginna. Lucie, this is Ginna Underwood, the executive director of the Balch Library. We lucked out meeting the top person as soon as we walked in. Ginna, this is my friend Lucie Montgomery.”

  Ginna Underwood came around from behind the circulation desk to shake my hand and give Kit a hug. “How can I help?” she asked. “What brings you here?”

  “I’m looking for information on an African-American man I believe lived over in Lincoln. He would have been in his twenties, maybe early thirties in 1862,” I said.

  “You’ve come to the right place. The library has census records, cemetery records, marriage indexes, and court records for free blacks.” She ticked items off on her fingers. “Plus we have thousands of personal documents—ephemera, unpublished papers, manuscripts, diaries, letters. Do you know, by chance, if he was a freeman or a slave?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about him, except that he was in love with one of my ancestors. They were hoping to run away to New York and get married. It didn’t work out.”

  Ginna’s smile was grave. “I presume your ancestor was a white woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he was a
slave, they never could have married. In Virginia or anywhere else. It would have been dangerous for them even to have been seen together.”

  “I know. I believe Susanna Montgomery—my ancestor—may have been murdered because she was in love with Henry. I was hoping to find out who he was and what happened to him.”

  Ginna frowned. “Henry … and Susanna? What’s Henry’s last name?”

  “Wells. I believe he was also related to someone named Rejoice Wells.”

  She fingered her lanyard, turning it over and over, a look of puzzled surprise on her face. “Henry Wells? We’ve been working on processing a collection we received a couple of years ago and, frankly, we’re just stuck. A real estate agent found a strongbox in the attic of a house she was selling over in Lincoln. The owners didn’t want it and the agent saw that it contained a lot of old documents and letters, so they told her she could bring it here and let us see if it was of interest to the library. The family’s name was Cooper, but there also were documents belonging to a branch of the family whose surname was Wells.”

  I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “Are you saying that you have papers that belonged to Henry Wells?”

  “I’m saying we have papers that belonged to a Henry Wells, along with other members of the Wells family. Including, as I recall, someone named Rejoice. The documents span several generations so we have letters that were written home from overseas during both the First and Second World Wars. It would be interesting to see if our papers belong to your Henry Wells, though it sounds as if they might. If that’s the case, we could use your help.”

  “Could we see them?” Kit asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “We keep all our historical records in a room behind the circulation desk. Follow me.”

  She picked up a set of keys that had been lying on the circulation desk and we followed her around to a door with a sign that said PROCESSED MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS.

  “You need to leave your jackets and your purses here.” She indicated a small table just outside the door. “Don’t worry, they’ll be perfectly safe.”

  Kit and I followed her inside and Ginna closed the door behind us. The room had a faintly musty smell of history and old secrets. Floor-to-ceiling rolling shelves spanned the length of the room and fitted together like a series of interlocking panels forming a false wall. Ginna cranked the handle on one of the panels and, like Aladdin’s Cave of treasures, two bookshelves seemed to magically separate along tracks in the floor revealing shelves of labeled archival boxes like the ones Leland had at home, along with stacks of papers, magazines, and old photo albums.

  “Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Kit said to me. “I’ve been in here before.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “Are all the shelves as full of boxes and papers as these are?”

  Ginna nodded. “They are. In fact we’re nearly at capacity. You’d be surprised the things we get and where they come from. Sometimes there’ll be a cardboard box on the doorstep outside when we show up for work one morning with no explanation about what it is or who left it there.”

  “People just dump things and leave?” I asked.

  “They do. In the case of the Cooper and Wells documents, we at least have some context since we know the house where they were found.” She walked down the aisle she had created by separating the two bookshelves and pulled out a cream-colored box. “This is what I was looking for. Come on. We’ll take a look at the contents in one of the reading rooms.”

  Kit and I sat on either side of Ginna Underwood at a conference table in a light-filled room called the Divine Room—named, as Ginna explained, for John Elbert Divine, a local historian who used to give impromptu Civil War talks at the library.

  She flipped open the top of the box. Inside it was filled with file folders, each one with a detailed handwritten label.

  “Yes,” Ginna said, when she saw my surprised expression, “it’s all done by hand. No computers for us, at least not until we upload the information to the internet so people know we have these documents.”

  “It’s impressive and it must take a long time.”

  “Believe me, it does,” she said. “Now, as it happens, I’m the one processing this particular collection so you’re in luck because I know quite a lot about these families.”

  “So that’s your handwriting?” I said, pointing to the tidy script on one of the files.

  “It is.”

  “Tell us about Henry,” Kit said. “Luce, show Ginna the photograph.”

  I got it out of my purse one more time and handed it to Ginna. “We have a photograph of an older man in this collection,” she said after she studied it. “It could be the same person. I’ll find it in a minute.”

  She pulled a sheet of typewritten notes out of a folder and started to read. “Henry Wells was a freeman who originally came from Ghana—the son of a prominent Ashanti village chief—and was sold into slavery in Virginia. However, he was so well-educated, in addition to being multilingual, that it wasn’t long before his owner decided to give him his freedom papers.” She looked up with a rueful smile. “Although we wish we had those documents here, they are actually in Washington in the African-American History Museum. You might want to go and see them. We also have documents indicating that Henry was involved in the Underground Railroad.”

  Kit gave me an I-told-you-so glance.

  I caught my breath. “What about Rejoice Wells?” I asked. “Who was she?”

  Ginna skimmed her notes. “Let’s see … Rejoice was Henry’s sister, a slave who worked as a seamstress for a well-to-do family in Middleburg. Eventually she and Henry, who was a cabinetmaker, were able to save up enough money to buy her freedom. Afterward she continued to sew and design dresses for some of the wealthier women in the region. Some of her receipts and sketches are among these papers.”

  A seamstress. That’s why there were so many different fabrics in Susanna’s quilt, scraps from the dresses and clothes Rejoice made for her rich clients. I told Ginna about the quilt and also what Thelma had told me about Susanna falling in love with an African-American man who I was almost certain was Henry Wells.

  Ginna smiled and slipped several files out of the box. She thumbed through them and pulled out a folder. “Then that would explain these,” she said. “Love letters from a woman named Susanna to Henry. Until today, we had no idea who she was.”

  “May I see them?”

  “Of course.”

  I opened the folder. Three letters written in the same flowery handwriting I’d found on the back of Henry’s photograph. It would take some time to properly decipher her script so I quickly looked them over, hoping to find any mention of her engagement to Charles or something about her family, who I was certain would be dead set against her relationship with a black man. What I did discover were Susanna’s deep feelings of loss and longing for Henry, her acute awareness of how dangerous their love was, and the realization that there were men who were ready to fight—literally—to prevent them from being together.

  I looked up. “I feel like I’m reading something out of Romeo and Juliet. How sad for them both.”

  “Isn’t it? I think what we should do,” Ginna said in a gentle voice, “is set up a time for you to go over the contents of this box on your own, when you don’t have to rush. Then afterward maybe you can help us fill in the gaps, things we don’t know about Susanna. And this friend of yours—Thelma—perhaps she might be willing to come along as well?”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said, closing the folder. “Are you quite sure Henry was involved in the Underground Railroad?”

  Ginna nodded and removed more files from the box. She opened one that contained a single document. The tissue-thin paper was nearly torn in two pieces and the faded writing was almost impossible to decipher.

  “This is a manumission slip,” she said. “It’s not Henry’s, but as you can see it’s extremely tattered and well worn.”

  “What’s a manumission slip?” Kit asked.

&
nbsp; “The paper a freeman or freewoman had to carry to prove their freedom. What happened, though, was that manumission slips were used over and over again by fugitive slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad in case anybody stopped them. We believe Henry was probably one of the conductors.” She opened another folder. “There were no road maps or plans—everything had to be memorized and runaway slaves traveled mostly at night—but we found this paper among his things.”

  She moved it into the light so Kit and I could read it. “It’s a list of distances between towns in Virginia and Maryland,” Kit said.

  “That’s right.” She slid another paper in front of Kit and me. “We also found this diagram. Unfortunately we don’t know where it is or what it represents.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “I do.”

  Ginna looked up, startled, and Kit said, “What is it?”

  I took Susanna’s copy of The Journal of John Woolman out of my bag and opened it to the back flyleaf.

  “It’s the same drawing,” Ginna said.

  I pointed to the house in the woods on both drawings. “I wonder if this cottage could have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. This plan was drawn in the back of the journal of a Quaker abolitionist that belonged to Susanna and you found the same plan among Henry’s documents. The cottage is on my land—in fact, my brother and I just came across it the other day. We’d never even known it was there because it’s so well hidden in the woods.”

  “What are you saying?” Kit said.

  “I think there’s a chance that Susanna could have been helping fugitive slaves escape to the North, most likely without anyone else in our family knowing about it, given that her father was one of Mosby’s Rangers. I think it’s possible that she and Henry were not only in love, they might have been partners in the Underground Railroad.”

  Nineteen

  I left Susanna’s book and the photograph of Henry Wells with Ginna Underwood, who asked if I’d be willing to come back to the library when I had more time so we could go over the documents belonging to Henry and Rejoice Wells together. We had looked at her picture of the older man she’d believed was Henry Wells and came to the conclusion that both photos were of the same person. I also promised to look through Leland’s records more thoroughly, in case I’d missed something.