“The Mohawk people believe in spirits.” Beulah crossed her arms and watched Verity devour a slice of buttered bread. “Spirits of the earth and spirits of our ancestors. If you look closely enough, you see their signs and know the path to follow.”
The water came to a boil, and Beulah filled the teapot and carried it over to Verity’s cup. “None of my people would have sent anyone to your mother’s grave,” she said. Verity winced, remembering her aunt’s callous accusation. “We don’t desecrate the ground of our ancestors—and besides, that gold is cursed by betrayal and blood. We don’t want it.”
Later, Verity sat on the front stoop, holding Nate’s hand and assuring him that she was, essentially, unharmed. She didn’t tell him about the sinister dreams that had left her shaken and filled with foreboding.
“I don’t care if she is the daughter of an apothecary,” Nate grumbled, watching Verity’s kitten attack the laces on his work boots. “That was uncalled for.”
Privately Verity agreed, but aloud she said, “Some people always think they know what’s best for you.”
“The grave’s repaired. Even your flowers have been replanted.” Nate shook his foot playfully, trying to dislodge Lucky from his shoe, but when he looked up, his face was grim. “I don’t think your plan to rebuild the cemetery wall is going to be enough. We should have the casket disinterred and moved inside the church grounds—publicly, so everyone can see for themselves there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be.”
“Do you think so?” His use of the word we irritated her. They weren’t married yet; it wasn’t his mother, nor his decision. “Shall we open the casket, too, and let anyone who wants feel around inside, just to make sure?”
He flinched, but her point had hit home.
“The only way to put down a lie is to discover the truth,” Verity said. “It’s a shame no one’s found that wretched treasure. You don’t think my uncle really does have it, do you? He seems well off for money, but I never see him do a lick of work.”
“He prefers other ways of making money.” Nate grimaced. “He gambles, Verity. Quite a bit—in town, in Wilkes-Barre, in Philadelphia, anywhere there’s dice and cards. I’m sorry to have to tell you.”
She sighed. “I’m not surprised, really. He doesn’t seem . . .”
“Sensible.” Nate looked out across Verity’s front yard, toward the Thomas lands. “His wife’s the one who manages the property and all the men working on it. If it weren’t for her, that farm would probably be in ruins. And it’s a fine piece of land.”
A sharp pain shot through Verity’s heart. She was tired of hearing how much Nate admired property. “It’s a wonder no one suggested you marry Liza Thomas,” she said tartly.
“Don’t laugh,” Nate replied, reaching down to scratch the kitten behind the ears. “That probably would have been my mother’s next plan.” And then he did laugh, but she did not.
Truth trumped lies.
Verity believed this without question. The gold was not in her mother’s grave, so if it existed, it must be somewhere else. She was not equipped to find it, but there were other lies for her to expose—such as the idea that her mother had died of a sickness born of some curse on the Clayton family.
Rebecca Clayton had been the first person to die of this illness, which eventually took three more Claytons and, three months later, Asenath and Sarah Ann. And Rebecca’s body had been stolen from its grave. Why? Had the strangeness of her death attracted the interest of someone who wanted to know the cause?
Verity would have liked to know the cause herself.
And then she realized she knew somebody who might be able to discover that very thing . . . if she dared ask him.
Calling on him in this manner was not a nice thing to do. But the need to know burned inside her. If Hadley Jones could provide her with a plausible explanation for the deaths, Verity could eliminate half the legend behind the caged graves.
She sat alone on a straight-backed chair in Dr. Robbins’s waiting room, relieved that the senior physician was absent from the house. Knowing how he’d treated his apprentice, she had no desire to meet him again.
It was Hadley Jones she heard in the examining room—him and another man—and the consultation didn’t seem to be going well. Although she couldn’t make out the words, the patient spoke in a harsh and accusing voice, while Jones’s calmer tones suggested an intent to reason with him.
The door opened abruptly, exposing her to their final exchange. “If you don’t do as I’ve instructed you, you’ll end up with blood poisoning—or, at best, I’ll have to take more of it off!” Jones said.
“All the same to you,” growled the patient, a man in his early twenties with a thin, sickly build and unclean reddish-blond hair. “What’s one more limb lopped off, here or there?”
Verity lowered her head as the men emerged but watched them from the corner of her eye. The patient shuffled into the anteroom, and his gaze raked over her with hostility. Hadley Jones reached inside his coat pocket. “Mr. Harwood,” he said. “About your payment.”
“Are you joking?” The patient turned on his heel angrily.
But Jones was taking cash out of his pocket. “Your change,” he said, holding out a wad of folded bills.
Harwood accepted it with his left hand, and Verity, watching through her lashes, saw that his right arm was amputated just below the elbow, the exposed stump raw and swollen. She cast her gaze at the floor again, unable to shake off the impression that the doctor had just paid the patient.
Harwood made his departure, and when Verity raised her eyes, Hadley Jones nodded with a polite but reserved smile. “Miss Boone, how can I help you?”
Verity rose, clutching an embroidered bag in her hand. “I was hoping you could diagnose an illness for me. Not my own,” she added hastily.
“Your father?” When he took a step toward her, she saw that the bruise on his cheek had turned purple.
“No—it’s no one you know.”
He surveyed her with inquisitive eyes, then gestured toward the open door of the examining room. “Shall we—?”
“Here would be fine.” Verity indicated his desk in the waiting room, and he moved her chair, placing it opposite his own. He kept a respectful distance, and she knew she’d made her message clear.
Once they were seated, Verity opened her bag and pulled out her mother’s notebooks. Slips of paper marked the pertinent pages. Jones sat in silence as she found the passages she wanted. “Severe pains in the stomach and gut . . . a slow heartbeat . . . watering from the eyes, nose, and mouth . . . stupor and death. Do you have any idea what illness could cause these symptoms?”
She looked up to find him gazing at her with bewilderment. “Whose illness are we talking about?” he asked.
“My deceased aunt—Asenath Thomas.”
Jones frowned and ran a hand through his ginger curls. “You’re asking me to diagnose the illness of someone who died twenty years ago?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Well, that makes all the difference.” He smiled wryly and held out his hand. “May I?” She handed the diary across the desk, and he read the entries. “It says she recovered.”
“But three months later she died after suffering the same symptoms. And so did my mother.” When he glanced up at her, she added, “Other people died of the same thing that August—four members of the Clayton family.”
Jones flipped to the pages Verity had marked with paper slips and read through them. Verity opened her mother’s last diary to the final page and laid it on the desk too. He leaned over to look, and his expression became grim as he saw the final, scrawled words. “Miss Boone, why are you pursuing this?”
“I want to know why my mother died.”
“What good can come of knowing the name of the sickness?” Jones raised his eyes to hers. “I foresee nothing but heartache in this for you—even if I can identify the illness for you.”
“I need to know the truth,” Verity countered
.
“You’re not thinking this has anything to do with what happened at the cemetery?”
“I do think so. I’ll pay you for your time.”
He smiled sadly. “I don’t want your money.”
“Nevertheless, I will pay you.”
Jones sat back in his chair and looked across the desk at her. She faced him, keenly aware of his concern, his interest—yet determined to keep this conversation professional. After a moment, he broke their gaze and cast his eyes over the two open notebooks. “You’ve marked the pages you want me to look at,” he said, “but I’ll have to read more. You might’ve missed things you didn’t realize were symptoms. Are you comfortable with that? I promise I won’t pry into your personal, private matters.”
“I was two years old,” she said. “My personal matters were not that private.”
He grinned. “I’ll do what I can to lay the matter to rest for you, Miss Boone. Please realize the chance is slim, but if I can help you, I will.”
Hadley Jones pushed back his chair, and Verity stood up. He rose to his feet and offered his hand across the desk. With some hesitation, she took it. His fingers closed around hers, warm and strong. She could not deny she was affected by his touch, but she said the only thing she could. “Thank you.”
“Anything—for you.”
Twenty-Three
VERITY HAD treated Clara Thomas coolly since the day of the laudanum-laced tea, and when her aunt invited her to help decorate graves in the cemetery for the Fourth of July, she almost declined. But anything happening at the cemetery was of interest to her, and if she wanted changes made, it would behoove her to stay involved.
Finding Mrs. Eggars there did not make for a promising start to the day. The hatchet-faced woman was adorning her own family graves with flowers and flags when Verity arrived with her aunt and cousin. “She never lifts a hand to do anyone else’s,” Liza grumbled under her breath. While Aunt Clara and Liza carried their heavy baskets of red, white, and blue bunting into the graveyard proper, Verity veered left outside the cemetery gate and walked around the wall to her mother’s grave.
One thing could be said about the cages: it was easy to attach the bunting. Flanked by ivy and forget-me-nots and draped in swoops of colorful fabric, the two iron structures looked almost beautiful. After adjusting the bunting on Asenath’s cage, Verity moved on to the other gravestones sharing this sad banishment outside the cemetery wall.
“What are you doing?”
Verity deliberately pulled up two more handfuls of weeds obscuring the old, worn headstone before acknowledging Mrs. Eggars’s pointed question. “I’m decorating the graves for the Fourth of July,” she said.
Mrs. Eggars waved her hand impatiently. “Not those graves, you silly girl! If you want to do your mother’s, I suppose I can’t stop you, but you absolutely cannot drape the Stars and Stripes over the other ones!”
“You’re right you can’t stop me,” Verity said, climbing to her feet and approaching the cemetery wall.
“He was a deserter!” Mrs. Eggars jabbed her index finger toward the worn, illegible stone.
Verity resisted an urge to slap that finger down. “He paid for his crime with his life. There’s no reason to shame him after death.”
“The Claytons are all heathens!”
“Yet I see them in church every Sunday.” Not Eli Clayton—but Verity had seen Idella and Cissy, with her out-of-wedlock child. They sat in the back, shunned by most of the other congregants. “There are plenty of Claytons buried inside the cemetery.”
“And they’ve caused no end of trouble!”
Before Verity could ask Mrs. Eggars what kind of trouble dead Claytons caused, Aunt Clara broke into the conversation. “Susanna Eggars, you had your way when you kept those two women out of the churchyard. Can’t you be satisfied and let my niece decorate the graves however she chooses?”
“I don’t remember you objecting at the time, Clara,” Mrs. Eggars snapped. “Had your eye on the prize as always, didn’t you?”
Verity glared at Mrs. Eggars. “What did my mother ever do to you,” she demanded, “that made you go out of your way to shame her?”
“I had nothing against Sarah Ann until she started consorting with witches.”
“Mrs. Eggars’s sister nearly died of childbed fever,” Aunt Clara explained to Verity. “And midwives are always convenient scapegoats.”
“That little Clayton witch left one of her heathen spells in my sister’s birthing chamber, and Belinda sickened,” Mrs. Eggars exclaimed. “Thank heavens I found it and removed it in time! Mrs. Harper wasn’t as lucky—her baby died of whooping cough before he was eight weeks old. And Gladys Morrow got a sty in her eye after Asenath mumbled some curse at her in the street.”
Verity gaped in disbelief. Aunt Clara clucked her tongue with annoyance, but Mrs. Eggars appeared to be quite serious. Spit flew from her lips as she continued her rant, pointing a bony finger at Asenath’s grave. “Finally, the Lord saw fit to smite her down, and if He took your mother too, I can only assume she’d gone to the Devil as well!”
“Mrs. Eggars,” Verity said through clenched teeth, “I suggest you keep your slanderous statements to yourself. As for these graves, I’ll decorate them as I see fit. If you don’t like it, you can take it up with my intended, Nathaniel McClure.”
Hearing Verity wield the name of the most powerful family in town, the woman took a step backward. Verity wasn’t entirely sure she was proud of herself for resorting to it.
“Come take your meal with us this afternoon,” her aunt said when the decorating was finished.
“No, thank you, Aunt Clara.”
“I insist.”
Verity had to return to the Thomas house to retrieve her sewing basket, which she’d used when they’d assembled the bunting that morning, but she had every intention of refusing to stay for the meal—until set upon by Piper and the twins. She found it impossible to disappoint the boys, and after all, she reminded herself, Aunt Clara had defended her mother against Mrs. Eggars.
After lunch, when she rose to leave, her aunt cornered her with a stack of papers, wanting her to choose a pattern for her bridal quilt. As Aunt Clara thumbed through the selections with her, explaining the history and significance of each, Verity wondered if she was trying to make amends for the laudanum. Polly Gaines would have advised Verity to let bygones be bygones, and so she listened patiently to her aunt and even volunteered an idea of her own. “I have some clothing of my mother’s that is too worn to be of use, but the fabric would make a nice quilt.”
“Very fitting,” Aunt Clara said. “It would be good to think Sarah Ann had a hand in your bridal quilt.”
Verity had narrowed her choices down to two when Liza pushed Stephen and Samuel through the kitchen door, calling out, “The doctor’s here to see the boys.”
“Ah,” said Aunt Clara, “it’s about time.”
Verity glanced up and met Hadley Jones’s eyes as he entered the kitchen. “What seems to be the problem today, Mrs. Thomas?” he asked, tearing his gaze away from Verity. “Teeth, you said?”
“Samuel has a rotted one, and Stephen—possibly two. I expect you’ll have to pull them.”
The boys shrieked in unison, each one fleeing in a different direction. Aunt Clara caught one by the collar and thrust him into Verity’s hands. “Hold Sam for the doctor,” she commanded. Then she followed Liza on the trail of the other twin.
Startled, Verity hung on to her cousin while Jones rolled up his sleeves. “Open up, Samuel,” he said.
The child shook his head and clamped his lips together. Jones regarded the boy for a moment, then pinched his nose shut. Verity made an outraged noise, but Jones grinned at her. “It’ll take only a few seconds.”
Samuel’s mouth popped open as he gasped for air, and the apprentice grabbed his open jaw with both hands. “Bite me and I’ll bite you back,” he warned.
The child rolled his eyes toward Verity for help, but she shrugged.
“I suggest you do as you’re told.”
Jones took a long look into Samuel’s mouth, pulling the boy’s lips apart and tilting his head back. “I know what you’re going to ask,” he said quietly. “But I don’t have an answer for you yet.”
Samuel stared at him, puzzled, but Verity knew he was talking to her. “You must have some thoughts on the matter.”
“I do,” he admitted. “But I’m not certain. Well, there’s no way I could be certain, this long after the fact.” He sighed and released the child’s mouth. “The tooth is rotted, but it’s a milk tooth and loose enough to fall out on its own. I’m surprised Mrs. Thomas hasn’t tied a string to a door and taken it out with a good slam.”
Samuel flinched.
“Just wiggle it around,” Jones advised the boy. He reached into his pocket and produced a piece of toffee. “Chew on this for a bit and see if you can get it out yourself.”
He swatted the boy away in dismissal, and Samuel vanished like a shot through the outside kitchen door. Then Jones met Verity’s eyes. “I wish you’d drop the matter.”
“I’m determined to know why they died.”
“I want to talk to Eli Clayton, and then I might be able to tell you something.” He reached out a hand and touched her arm. “Any answer I give you is going to make you unhappy; you realize that, don’t you?”
The back door opened and Nate strode in, carrying a bushel of peaches.
For just a moment they all three froze—and then Hadley Jones belatedly removed his hand from Verity’s arm.
Nate shoved the basket onto the kitchen table, scattering quilt patterns and spilling fruit. “Here are the peaches your aunt wanted.” He turned on his heel and was out the door again in a second.
“Nate!” cried Verity.
She bolted from the kitchen and ran to catch up with his long, angry strides. “Nate! Don’t you dare walk away from me like this!”
The Caged Graves Page 15