by Hester Fox
“Caleb,” she said softly, “I made a home for you in my heart since the first moment I saw you all those years ago. I’ve just been waiting for you to come and take your place in it.”
This seemed to take him by surprise. He took a step back, his lips twitching into a frown. Perhaps he hadn’t actually expected her to return the sentiment and was at a loss for words. But there was no denying the look of smoldering longing in his eyes.
“Well?” she said expectantly. “Is there something you’d like to ask me?”
“I suppose I... That is, I’m asking if you would marry me,” he said, the words seeming to surprise him even as they came out of his own mouth.
Her heart stopped in her chest, and for a brief, terrible moment, she was sure that he was playing some sort of cruel trick on her. But one look at the desperate vulnerability on his face told her that he was in earnest.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she said, unable to stop the laughter from bubbling up in her throat. If the trials of the past months had taught her anything, it was that happiness was fleeting, and it could be found only within oneself and the love one shared with others.
“Oh, thank goodness.” His shoulders sagged in relief and he closed his eyes. “My mother would never forgive me if I came home without an answer in the affirmative from you.”
At this, Caleb finally broke free of where he had been standing, and before she knew what was happening, he was leaning in to kiss her. Instead of a hungry embrace, he simply brushed his lips reverently against her temples. She closed her eyes, relishing the sweetness, the warmth of him. But no sooner had she opened her eyes than her world threatened to break apart again.
“What is it?” Caleb followed her line of sight to where two figures were picking their way over the ice at the cemetery gate. He frowned. “Do you know them?”
Tabby knew them all too well. “My aunt and uncle.” She could feel Caleb stiffen at her words.
“The nerve of them,” he muttered, moving to put her behind him. But she held her ground.
Her aunt looked thin, drained of color with her dark hair pulled severely back under a moth-eaten fur hat.
“Tabby,” she said with a tight smile. “Dear, dear Tabby. I know we left on less than ideal terms, but I come bearing no ill will.”
Tabby didn’t say anything.
“I understand why you ran away all those years ago, but it can be different now. You’re a grown woman and I’ve seen for myself how you have come into your powers. Come back and join us, and you’ll share equally in the profits. Just look at Cora Hatch and the fame she has achieved.”
“Your aunt is right,” her uncle put in. “Just think of the profits.”
Tabby ignored him. “You must have heard that your good friends from Harvard have been apprehended and charged with all manner of crimes. I wonder what would happen if your role in their despicable scheme was known.”
Her aunt’s face went even whiter. “What...what do you mean?”
“I know that you helped them. I know that you provided information to them, gleaned from your clients about when and where they could find bodies. I know that you helped them apprehend Alice. I have no interest in seeing you jailed, but neither have I interest in ever, ever crossing paths with you again, or hearing that you are cheating money out of the bereaved.”
She hadn’t needed him there, but it felt good to have Caleb’s steady presence behind her as she confronted the monsters of her childhood.
“I see,” her aunt said, her dark eyes shining with hatred. “Well. You always were a wicked, ungrateful child.” She sniffed. “Come along, Harold.”
“Tabby,” her uncle said with a tip of his hat, before her aunt could yank him along by his arm.
When they had gone, Caleb slipped his arm about her waist. “Well done,” he murmured into her ear. She leaned into him, her legs shaking.
Mary-Ruth and Alice were returning. “Was that...” Alice looked back at where the figures of their aunt and uncle were retreating through the gravestones.
“They won’t bother us again,” Tabby told her.
“They should be put on trial, just the same as Mr. Whitby,” Mary-Ruth said.
Now it would be her aunt and uncle forever looking over their shoulders, too afraid to set down roots.
“We’re going to go find some hot chowder and strong ale. Are you two lovebirds coming?” Mary-Ruth asked with a raised brow at Caleb’s arm around Tabby’s waist.
“You go on ahead,” Tabby told them. “There’s something I need to do.”
She watched as Caleb turned to join Mary-Ruth and Alice. “Wait,” she said, reaching out and taking him by the arm. “Come with me. Please.”
Using her gift with other people present had always been fraught with terror and unwillingness, but she trusted him, and realized that she wanted him there. Besides, Rose had been an important person in his life, and he deserved closure as much as she.
Surprise flickered across his face, but then he was following her to the other side of the cemetery. It didn’t matter where she tried to contact Rose, and this was a secluded, pretty spot with the foggy harbor just beyond. Tabby moved to take off her cloak to spread on the ground, but Caleb stopped her, removing his coat and laying it over the knobby roots of an elm. Helping her down, they sat side by side, shoulders touching.
She had scarcely closed her eyes when the darkness came. This time it was not a rushing, pressing flood, but a gentle lapping that slowly crept over the corners of her mind.
Tabby didn’t need to call her name or reach out very far to find who she was looking for; almost instantly the delicate smell of spring flowers filled the space around her.
I promised that I would help you, she said into the darkness, and I think I can, now that Mr. Whitby has been exposed for the villain he is. You’ll have justice, and you will not be forgotten.
Rose stood with an aura of light shining from behind her. Tabby had never known the dead to smile, but Rose came the closest she had ever seen, her face placid. The light grew stronger and brighter, gradually enveloping Rose’s form until Tabby had to look away.
Her relief that Rose had found peace was tinged with melancholy for the life on earth that had been so violently interrupted. Would Rose and Caleb have married had she not been murdered? Would she have borne children? Written poetry? Become one of the most sparkling socialites in Boston? Tabby pushed the thoughts away; it did no good to dwell on what might have been.
When nothing remained of Rose except the lingering scent of flowers, Tabby slowly opened her eyes and came back to the land of the living. Ahead of her, Mary-Ruth and Alice were laughing with heads bowed closed together at some private joke. Caleb took her arm and tucked it into his elbow, and they passed out of the misty cemetery and down the hill, leaving the dead to their eternal slumber.
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Witch of Willow Hall by Hester Fox.
Author Note
While exploring an old cemetery on the North Shore of Massachusetts, I discovered an informational plaque that mentioned a local man who had been found guilty of robbing corpses for medical research in the 1810s. Intrigued, I began researching the history of grave robbing in Massachusetts, and learned that it persisted much later into the nineteenth century than I had originally realized. While Mr. Whitby and his exploits are fictional, Harvard really did have a macabre history of employing grave robbers to provide their medical students with bodies for dissection. The resurrection men and the Spunker Club were real, and took their job of procuring the bodies of the recently deceased seriously. In 1999, construction workers at Harvard found the bones of at least eleven individuals, believed to have been deposited in a basement after dissection in the early 1840s.
I based Tabby’s “Cemetery Hill” on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End, a quiet cemet
ery that sits on a hill on the historic Freedom Trail. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground is the final resting place of many notable early Bostonians, as well as over one thousand free and enslaved Black peoples (most in unmarked graves). After the end of slavery in Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century, the Copp’s Hill area became an enclave of free Black people, known as New Guinea. While these people were largely displaced by the influx of Italian and Irish immigrants, the Copp’s Hill area was still home to a small African American community through the late-nineteenth century. Today you can visit the African Meeting House on the Freedom Trail to learn more about the history of the African American community in Boston.
In 1848, the Fox sisters of Rochester, New York, became a national sensation after word of their uncanny ability to channel the messages of the dead spread across the country. Soon other mediums, such as Cora Hatch (nee Scott), would mesmerize audiences with their abilities to speak on esoteric subjects while in a trance. Boston, already a hotbed for new philosophies and movements, was soon swept up in the craze that was known as spiritualism.
Spiritualism only increased in popularity as the Civil War raged. No one in the United States was left untouched by the conflict, and many were desperate to reach loved ones who had died in battle. Even Mary Todd Lincoln visited the spirit photographer William H. Mumler, and received a photograph that appeared to show her late husband hovering reassuringly over her shoulder.
In 1854 in Lynn, Massachusetts, a spiritualist named John Murray Spear claimed to be receiving messages from the spirits of prominent men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These spirits advised Spear to build a “mechanical messiah” that would usher in a new utopian age of enlightenment. An angry mob ultimately destroyed the metal being. It’s a wild story, and if you’re ever in Lynn, you can still visit the tower where these events transpired.
Many spiritualists and mediums of this time period were publicly disproven or revealed to be frauds, with Maggie Fox confessing that the supernatural sounds and messages from the other side had been manufactured by her and her sisters (though she would recant this confession a year later). Mumler likewise was put on trial for fraud, and though he was acquitted, his career never recovered.
I first learned of Mary-Ruth’s profession of “watching” from a Splinter article by Isha Aran titled “The Death Midwife: Women Were the Original Undertakers” (it was published online October 23, 2015, and I highly recommend giving it a read). I also found the article “When Death Was Women’s Business” by Livia Gershon incredibly informative. Being a watcher (or, “watch woman”) was a real vocation in the nineteenth century, and was almost exclusively filled by women, sometimes as a paid position and sometimes as an unpaid extension of their other domestic duties. Being buried alive was a common fear of the time, and there was a need for someone to not only care for the dying, but to make sure that they were indeed dead when the time came. But more than that, there was no real funerary industry like there is today, and the business of death was carried out in the domestic sphere. This changed after the Civil War with the popularization of embalming, and so, like many other professions before it, embalming became the work of men once there was money to be made from it.
Another resource I found helpful when writing The Orphan of Cemetery Hill was Widow’s Weeds and Weeping Veils: Mourning Rituals in 19th Century America by Bernadette Loeffel-Atkins. If you are interested in mourning embroidery, hair art, and basically anything to do with the fascinating social system of mourning in the nineteenth century, then this is the book for you. Atlas Obscura likewise provided lots of interesting and arcane material, such as the story of High Rock Tower. And of course, much of my inspiration simply came from the old cemeteries of New England, their crumbling stones, and the forgotten stories they commemorate.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people who not only helped make this book a reality, but have supported me in my writing journey in one way or another. Chief among them are my editor, Brittany Lavery, and agent, Jane Dystel. I am truly humbled to have two such amazing women on my team, helping me grow my craft and advocating for me.
My thanks to everyone at Graydon House, as well as the Harlequin art department, who time and again so brilliantly bring to life the atmosphere of my stories. In the UK, I have an equally wonderful team at HQ led by Sarah Goodey.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to the booksellers and librarians who read and promote by books. Special thanks to Belmont Books in Belmont, Massachusetts; The Open Book in Warrenton, Virginia; and the Malden Public Library. I am also thankful for all the book bloggers and bookstagrammers who feature and share my work.
Love and thanks to Trish, my wonderful critique partner and first reader. Also Jeannie, the best cheerleader and friend a writer could ask for. Jenny, Debby, Bev, and the rest of the 1linewed crew. As always, I am incredibly grateful to my friends and family who come out to support me at my events.
All my love to my little team, MF & FF.
The Witch of Willow Hall
by Hester Fox
1
1811
IT WAS THE Bishop boy who started it all.
He lived one house over, with his snub nose and dusting of freckles, and had a fondness for pelting stones at passing carriages. We were the same age and might have been friends, but he showed no interest in books, exploring the marshy fens of Boston, or taking paper kites to the Commons—unless of course it was the rare occasion of a public hanging. Catherine would sit in the window, watching him flee from angry coachmen, shaking her head. “That Bishop boy,” she would say. “It’s a wonder his pa doesn’t put a belt to him, the vicious little imp.”
I’d follow her gaze from the safety of the drapes, ducking back if I thought he might catch me looking at him. In my small, sheltered world the Bishop boy came to symbolize the murky edge of a larger evil of which I had no understanding. When Father lamented British aggression toward American ships, I imagined a fleet of freckled boys with sandy hair, identical in their blue coats as they drew their swords in unison. If there was news of a killer in the city, then he took on a slight frame, a shadowy figure with a snub nose protruding from his hood. The Bishop boy lurked around every dark corner, responsible for every terrible thing in the world that my young mind could not comprehend.
One day, Father—this was before he had made his fortune and he was still our “Pa”—found a little black cat under the steps at his office, and brought it home as a pet for Catherine and me with the stipulation that it wouldn’t come in the house. Catherine said she was too old to play nursemaid to a kitten, though sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking I saw her sneak out to the stable with a bit of bread soaked in milk. This was before our little sister, Emeline, came along, so I was hungry for a companion, as Catherine and our brother, Charles, were practically joined at the hip. Every morning as soon as I could be excused from the breakfast table, I would rush out to the stable with a precariously balanced saucer of milk and a tattered hair ribbon that I had appropriated as an amusement for the cat.
It must have been spring, because I remember the heady scent of wet earth and lilacs as I emerged from the house into the garden, my heart light and happy to be free. To this day I can’t smell lilac without a pit hardening in my stomach. And it must have been a Thursday, because Mrs. Tucker who came on that day to teach us French was there; I remember later the way her severe black eyebrows shot upward, her thin lips that never did anything except press into a tight frown, thrown open forming a perfect O, emitting that awful scream.
So it was a Thursday in spring. Usually Bartholomew—I thought myself very clever for this name until Catherine pointed out that Bartholomew was, in fact, a she—squeaked in greeting before I even got to the straw-filled crate that Mother had made for her. The only sounds that greeted me that day were the gossiping swallows and soft whickering of the horses. I slowed my step, not wanting to wake Ba
rtholomew if she was sleeping. I rounded the corner to the empty stall and peeked over into the crate.
I think I knew what I would find there before I even saw it. There was something heavy and terrible about the silence, a disturbance in the air, quivering with secrets. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw the blood-flecked straw. Something pure and loving made base, a pile of inert organs and tufts of black fur.
I don’t know how long I stood there, unable to comprehend what lay in front of me, and after this it gets hazy.
I found myself outside, storming into the street with pounding ears and a film of red behind my eyes. It’s funny, because for all the racing of my heart and the tightness of my throat, I have the recollection that I was remarkably calm. I had a sense of purpose, of what needed to be done. But for all that, I still didn’t know how I was going to do it.
The Bishop boy was there. He blinked when he saw me coming, the slow, lazy blink of someone who either doesn’t know what they’ve done, or else doesn’t care. Why, he didn’t even try to hide the fact that there was fur on his cuffs, that his brown shoe was damp with splattered blood. He just gave me that infuriating blink and then turned back to the stash of pebbles he was collecting.
There must have been at least a dozen people gathered around on the cobblestones by the time Tommy Bishop lay whimpering and crying out for his mother. That was when I came back to myself, when I realized just how many eyes were on me and what I had done. From somewhere behind the crowd Mother was calling to be let through, elbowing her way past a fainted Mrs. Tucker and snatching me up before a mob could form.
More than anything else I was frightened of what would happen to me. Would she tell Father? Would I be sent away? Catherine had told me that bad children were often sent to Australia, a desert land where they were forced to build their own prisons out of sunbaked mud bricks. The only food was rats roasted on spits, and there wasn’t a book on the whole island.