by Julia Byrd
A history of loss and a terrible stammer have led gravedigger Benjamin Hood to a life of isolation.
When a rash of untimely deaths sweeps through his small English village, he cannot stand by in silence. To uncover the truth about the lives lost, he takes up a long-neglected role of responsibility among the townspeople.
As Benjamin questions the victims' families, he finds that beautiful widow Juno Stephens has preceded him in each case. She makes no secret of her odd midnight ceremonies and dark powers of persuasion. The villagers are whispering about a woman bearing a lethal hex.
Is Juno the source of danger in the village, or a victim of it? Benjamin must resist her beguiling ways and decide if he can trust her...until another death sets his smoldering worries ablaze.
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SOIL AND CEREMONY
Julia Byrd
Published by Tirgearr Publishing
Author Copyright 2019 Julia Byrd
Cover Art: Evernight Designs (http://www.evernightdesigns.com)
Editor: Lucy Felthouse
Proofreader: Sharon Pickrel
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Thank you for respecting our author’s hard work.
This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
DEDICATION
In memory of my dad.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my beta readers, Kiri Blakely, Molly Filler, and Katie Freeman, who are insightful and honest readers and helped greatly improve this story. Thank you to my main squad, the NYC book club squad, my strong mother, my aunties, and my sisters-in-law and sister-outlaws. Thanks to the excellent team at Tirgearr Publishing, including Kemberlee Shortland, Lucy Felthouse, and Elle J. Rossi. Thank you most of all to Brian, who gave me the world when he gave me time and space to write.
SOIL AND CEREMONY
Julia Byrd
Chapter 1: Rite of Introduction
Autumn 1840, near Stanmore, England
It was easy to dig the grave for the infant boy. It should have been difficult, the hardest task on earth to accomplish. Instead, I scarcely perspired as I shoveled dirt from a tiny rectangle. The job would soon be done, and I would be no different for it. I should have wept. I should have torn the calluses from my palms. I should have bled into the dirt.
But after it was done, I stabbed my spade into the rich autumn soil of Maida Green and straightened. I would do it again next week, or perhaps the one after. Babes die too often for a gravedigger to weep and rend and bleed each time. Apart from his mother, who carried him for months beneath her heart, nobody really knew the lad.
My apprentice worked on the other side of the path, hacking at a recalcitrant Cornus alba, a red-barked dogwood. He was watched over by the hulking manor house on a hill beyond the cemetery walls, called Maida House. One wing of the house was over two hundred years old, but Maida Green Cemetery was young, with fifty acres occupied by only a few hundred permanent residents. Its acreage had been portioned away from the traditional Maida House property like a severed limb. On quiet days, working in the cemetery was like working in a verdant park. We cut open the ground for more shrubs than graves, and pillars of smoke more frequently rose from burning leaves than burning incense. No smoke ever rose from the chimneys of Maida House.
“T-Toth,” I said, pulling my gaze from the house’s dark windows. His Christian name, Everett, was too much for my traitorous tongue. “L-l-leave some of th-those s-stems.”
My thoughts were clear, or as clear as any man’s, I suppose, but my words were not. As a result, I mostly kept my lips sealed. But Everett did not mind my stammer, and neither did the dead.
“I will,” he said. “They’ll look right cheery this winter.”
“M-more of them along th-th-th—”
“The south wall, I know. I’ll go over there next.”
I did not like being interrupted, but I liked it better than becoming stuck in a repeating loop, words swirling like a leaf in an eddy. I grunted an acknowledgment and turned for the groundskeeper’s cottage. I wanted to put the shovel away and check the log for burials planned for the next week.
“Ben?”
I stopped, turned, lifted my eyebrows.
Everett crouched over a patch of dirt, peering intently at something. “What used to grow here?”
The cemetery kept no secrets from me, but I never claimed to have memorized all the plantings. I walked back to him, then sank down on one knee in the grass. There was a little hole in the dirt, right beside the Cornus alba. “D-don’t know.”
“Something was dug out.”
I nodded.
He turned dark brown eyes on me. “Did you dig up anything?”
I shook my head.
Everett touched the crumbling edge of the excavation, then rubbed his fingers together, face tightening in concentration. He appeared much more interested in the hole than I was. When I had saved the money to buy my brother’s farm, Everett would become the head groundskeeper at Maida Green. It was a good thought, a consoling thought. He deserved it, and he cared as much about the place as I did. Maida Green had been conceived when the old London cemeteries reached their fill of occupants. In the city, the dead sifted up through the soil, gleaming skulls and unseemly scapulae sprouting in the grass. But in our village, a few hours’ ride northwest from the dome of St. Paul’s, we had plenty of space. The walls were high and the gate strong—to deter the body-snatchers and anatomists from coming to take our fresh corpses. Families paid well for eternal rest.
“Hmm. No scat or claw marks. Not a mole, then, nor a badger.” Everett smoothed dirt into the hole. “Probably nothing. I do wish that Horvath boy hadn’t died. Making me twitchy and mistrustful, and I’m not the only one.”
I rose and started back towards my cottage. The main gravel path had an offshoot, a narrow track that curved behind a group of young trees and led to the groundskeeper’s cottage. It was snug and dry, with a pump in the yard that delivered cold, sweet water. Sometimes, after the gates were locked at night, I imagined I slept in a manor house with my own manicured parkland spreading around me like a green quilt.
As I returned the shovel to its hook under the sloping lean-to on the side of the house, something made me pause. The cemetery’s huge shears, steel-bladed with leather-wrapped grips, hung in the wrong place. Everett could have put them away incorrectly. I could have done it myself. But neither of us had tied a black silk ribbon around the pivot or threaded onto the ribbon a tiny slip of paper. For a moment I just stared.
The ribbon came loose with a tug, and I unfolded the scrap of paper. On it was written two words in a flowing, feminine script.
Thank you.
I jerked my head up and looked around. Was she still nearby? Surely one of us would have noticed a woman wandering the premises. Women frequently entered the cemetery, visiting graves and leaving flowers. But they didn’t borrow my shears.
The silk ribbon snagged on my rough fingert
ips, and on some impulse, I lifted it to my nose. It smelled of…nothing. It was just a strip of fabric. Had I expected to catch a lingering whiff of rosewater? Lavender? I snorted at my own fancy and jammed the note and ribbon into a pocket.
That evening, after Everett had gone home and the gates were locked, I lit a stout candle in the cottage and sat at my table with the note spread before me. Thank you. She thanked the shears themselves, rather than me. There was grave dust under my fingernails, and the elbows of my shirt were worn thin. No lady with handwriting like that was interested in sending me polite regards.
I reversed the paper to its blank side, then grabbed the quill and ink that I kept with the cemetery’s logbook. In my jagged, cramped lettering, I wrote:
If you wish to avail yourself of tools, please ask and receive permission first.
The appended note I threaded back onto its ribbon, which I looped around the center pivot of the shears. I untied and retied the bow when my first attempt was lopsided.
At noon the following day, Everett stood by my side as we watched the ceremony around the infant grave I had opened. Maida House observed us with windows like eyes, silent and dark. Stop staring at me, you old skeleton.
Nobody likes gravediggers, grieving parents least of all, so Everett and I kept ourselves out of their line of sight. The vicar led the group in the Lord’s Prayer, and I mouthed the words along with him. Beside me, Everett’s stance was rigid, his shoulders tensed. Afterward, the vicar and another man knelt. A small, whitewashed coffin was lowered into the pit, and the boy’s small, pallid mother shed all the tears that I had not wept while digging.
Ten feet away, a robin plucked at an earthworm. Beside it there was another hole in the ground where some other bush had been dug up and carried off.
Chapter 2: Rites of the Thief
A new note that evening was tied to the handle of a zinc pail. The bucket still carried a few grains of black soil. I had seen no one lurking around the cottage, but its corner of the park was often out of my sight as I worked. Was she sneaking inside somehow? Had she been there while I slept? It was unsettling. I snatched at the ribbon with undue haste and then forced myself to slip the paper into my pocket. The fabric of my pocket touched the top of my thigh, and even through my flannel drawers, I felt feminine handwriting pressing against me.
Once inside, I lit the candle and smoothed the paper. It was a larger square, and the script covered it from edge to edge.
Thank you for the use of your pail, and thank you, pail. I prefer thanking or apologizing to asking permission. I like “avail.” I have availed myself of your pail and rhymed for more than enough of your time.
I read it thrice, grinning like a cat in a sunbeam. She thanked me and the pail both. My little finger brushed over the swoops of her flowing script, absorbing her.
The reverse of the page was blank, but I did not want to write there. I wanted to keep the note, to reread it tomorrow and the next day, not pollute it with my scrawl and return it to her. Instead, I found an old receipt, the record of payment made to a cobbler for the resoling of my boots and wrote on the back.
Will you denude the park of its plantings one by one? How shall we grieve our lost Viburnum tinus?
I believed that to be the second plant she stole, a flowering evergreen shrub with beadlike blue berries. I was showing off my Latin, which over the course of years had been reduced to church phrases and an absurd number of plant species. Writing down my question was a welcome change from stammering through it. In some other life, like some other man, I might have studied history or botany. The two sentences flowed from my pen more easily than any two sentences I had ever spoken aloud. I threaded the note onto the ribbon and looped the ribbon around the handle of the pail.
Everett did not comment that I was especially quiet because I was always quiet, but he noticed I was distracted. We raked gravel over one of the side paths, and he caught me smiling. I pulled the brim of my hat lower and schooled my features. But at the end of the day, we had discovered no new holes, no stolen plants. Had I scared her away?
I practically shooed Everett away at dusk and slammed the gate with a reverberating clang. At the cottage, a new note waited. The ends of our black ribbon were becoming slightly frayed from usage.
I like ‘denude.’ How do you normally grieve your lost plants? I can help you with that tonight if you wish.
I did not understand her offer of help, but it set my heart thumping in my chest. Tonight. In the yard, I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it away. The pump handle required only a few plunges to draw up a gush of icy water. I ducked my head under it and scrubbed at my hair, face, neck. Fingernails.
But then, dripping and shivering in the fading twilight, I imagined stuttering my way through my own name, through painful and awkward explanations. B-B-Benjamin Hood would never speak ‘denude’ or ‘avail’ in any setting. I would never have spoken to her at all, except she wrote to thank my shears and my pail.
Regardless, she shouldn’t be allowed to continue stealing from the cemetery grounds. I would have to meet her. Moving slowly, I retrieved my shirt and returned to the cottage for a fresh one. Everett would want to know about our thief’s visit. As I departed to fetch him, I left the gate standing ajar one single, inviting inch.
* * *
Everett resided in the village with his mother and younger sister, only a hundred yards away from my mother’s little house. I skulked past her glowing windows, guilty as a scolded mutt. My mother had withdrawn in the years since my brother’s death, and she wanted little to do with me. My brother, Joseph, and I had looked much alike. Unlike me, my brother had been charming and loquacious. If Father’s death damaged our family, Joseph’s death had fractured us entirely. We’d gone our separate ways. I became the quiet groundskeeper, nothing more.
But Mrs. Toth didn’t worry much about my family, and Everett never bothered to ask. I loved them all the better for it.
I stopped outside the Toth household and tucked my hat under my arm. Then, with my hand raised to knock, I noticed a mark over the doorframe. I lifted my fingers another fraction and touched the drawing. It was a rough shape, an open triangle with a dot in the center. Drawn in smudged charcoal above the whitewashed doorframe, it didn’t look like something Mrs. Toth would have used to decorate the exterior of her property. Who could have drawn it, and why? I turned the heel of my hand to it and rubbed until it was nothing more than a gray smudge. No need to worry, Everett. I wiped my hand with my handkerchief and then knocked.
Mrs. Toth opened the door. “Ben! Come in, we haven’t seen you in a while.” She was always in motion, and she bustled me into the house before I could object. “To what do we owe this pleasure? My word, I always forget you’re too big for this little house. Watch your head on the pot rack. Everett!” she shouted up the narrow staircase. “Ben is here. Do you want any of our supper, darling? How is your mother?”
I could not possibly keep up with her or respond to all her questions. Instead, I smiled politely and turned my hat in circles in my hands. Mrs. Toth had rich, deep-toned skin, the same as Everett’s, and black hair streaked with gray. The Toths were the only dark-complexioned family in the village. Everett’s father had left long ago with no explanation. From within my own isolation, I understood their version of polite exclusion as something different, something external rather than internal, despite Mrs. Toth’s decades of residence in the village. She kept her hair confined under a cotton cap, although the strands around her face were escaping and exuberant.
Everett skittered down the stairs with his sister, Lucy, on his heels. “Everything all right?” he asked. His eyes narrowed. I did not often pay social visits.
“C-can I speak w-w—erm.” I glanced at Mrs. Toth, who angled her chin in sympathy, and my face burned. I exhaled, inhaled, and tried again. “O-Outside?”
“Yes.” He grabbed up his boots from the tray by the door. “Mother, I’ll return within an hour.”
“W-wil
l you r-return to M-Maida Green?” I asked after we were alone in the front garden. “S-someone has been sn-sneaking in, and she’ll be b-back t-tonight.”
“She?” Everett raised his eyebrows. “How do you know this? Has she been digging up our plants?”
I did not want to drag out the whole story. I gestured for him to precede me. “C-come on.”
It was less than a mile to Maida Green, but Everett asked questions the whole way. I demurred and held my silence. When the unlocked gate came into view, I imagined a woman slipping around the wrought-iron scrollwork and stealing down the path. But I could not assign any details to the figure. What if I was wrong and the handwriting belonged to a man? Why should it matter? She could be a hundred years old or beautiful and married.
“Where will we find her?” Everett asked.
She hadn’t specified, but I knew. “By th-that new infant’s gr-grave. Where she took th-the V-Viburnum tinus.”
We hurried along the path, making enough noise on the gravel to wake the dead around us. Then, as we rounded a curve, we saw a woman standing where I had guessed she would be. She had her hands interlaced before her, her head bowed as she stared at the hole where the shrub was not. My heart kicked up again, and my feet slowed. She raised her head at our approach.
Everett strode away from me. “You there!” he said. “Madam, excuse me. Visiting hours are from dawn until dusk only. What are you doing here?”
I broke into a slow jog. If he frightened her, she might evaporate into mist before I could truly see her.
Everett stopped and crossed his arms, displaying as much authority as any twenty-year-old man could muster. The woman studied him as I studied her. Her eyes were huge and dark, and her chin came to a narrow point. I had only the light of the moon and stars with which to see her.