Verity set down her cup. If she’d come to Beulah at the beginning, looking for the truth, could she have avoided all that had happened? Or were confessions like this only possible late at night, after the worst day of one’s life?
“I was against sending you away,” Beulah continued. “Not that anybody asked my opinion. The poor man had lost his wife; they shouldn’t have taken his daughter away from him too.” She sipped from her cup again and added, almost as an afterthought, “Having you back is the best thing that ever happened to him.”
Verity blinked rapidly. “I thought you didn’t like me.”
“Why wouldn’t I like you? I helped your mother birth you, didn’t I?”
Tears blurred her vision. “You said I needed spanking half a dozen times a day,” she whispered.
“You still do,” Beulah snapped. She plunked her empty cup down on the table. “So what are you planning to do about him?”
Verity didn’t need to ask who she meant.
Thirty-Four
THEY FOUND Nate in the orchard the next morning, as Verity guessed they would. She wasn’t surprised he would turn to something that gave him comfort. It grieved her to imagine how he must have felt last night when she devoted herself to the care of another man, and she didn’t know if he would forgive her. Ransloe Boone didn’t drive the wagon away after she climbed down but instead sat there silently.
Verity knew what Nate thought when he realized that her father was going to wait for her; she could see it in his face.
Nate dropped his eyes as she approached, and she sensed that he was gathering his composure. When she was close enough, he looked up and spoke first. “How is he?”
How like him to ask about Hadley Jones before anything else and to sincerely care about the answer. “Better this morning,” Verity replied. “Dr. Robbins sent word.”
Heartbeat stronger, Robbins had written. Not much color, but he’s awake and asking for you. Then, at the bottom of the note, he’d added: Miss Boone, if you were a boy, I’d sign you on as apprentice.
“He’ll make it,” Nate said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know what will become of him if he does.” Verity knew that the sheriff was anxious to have a long conversation with Hadley Jones.
“He was trying to protect his brother as long as possible,” Nate said. “And when he wasn’t able to any longer, he made his stand. People understand that. You might find he’s even respected a little more for it. We take care of our own. People will try to keep those little Thomas boys from learning what their mother did. My mother’s already gone down to the house to see about those children, and I expect . . .”
Verity flinched at the mention of Clara Thomas, and Nate broke off what he was saying. “I’m sorry!” he blurted out instead. “You were right all along, and I kept telling you to leave it alone. I was wrong and stubborn and jealous. If I had listened to you in the first place—”
Verity shook her head sadly. “You couldn’t have prevented it. Even I never dreamed the truth could be something like this—that she would do such a thing.”
Or that she would plan to do it again.
I decided it might be better to let you marry Nathaniel so he could get the Boone land, and I could deal with you afterward. Without the opportunity to deal with Verity on the spot, Clara Thomas might never have been found out. Beulah’s watchful eyes would have failed someday, and Verity would have succumbed to a cup of tea or a honey cake.
All for the young man who stood before her.
Gazing up into his stormy eyes, Verity marveled that, once again, his presence left her nearly speechless. She didn’t even know where to begin telling him everything she wanted him to know.
He took a step back, his gaze dropping to her hand. “I know what you’ve come here to say. There’s no need. I won’t stand in your way.”
Verity looked down. The ring. Perhaps that was a good place to start. She began to twist it loose from her finger.
Nate took another step back. “Give that to my mother. I don’t want it. I could never give it to anyone else.” His voice was hoarse.
“I was hoping,” she said, holding it up, “that you would offer it to me again. Properly this time,” she added, “without letting your mother speak for you.”
“I didn’t—” Then he clamped his lips shut. He had, and they both knew it.
She felt a little teary, but she blinked to clear her eyes. “On your knees, too, I think.”
Nate took the ring and closed it tightly in his palm. “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “Verity, I saw your face when he was hurt. I know you love him.”
“He was shot before my eyes!” she cried. “I was horrified! I didn’t want him to die, Nate, but I don’t love him. Do you think I could have stood there and assisted at his surgery if I was in love with him?” A wave of emotion came over her, and she shuddered. “If it had been you on that table, I would have fainted. And I never faint.”
Nate looked confused. “I don’t understand,” he repeated.
“Nate, you asked me days ago if I loved you, and I didn’t answer. You were right: I read that poem, but I didn’t know what it meant until now.” She glanced at the trees around them, groping for the right words. “I thought love was—big and loud and sudden, like a thunderbolt.” She looked back, meeting his eyes. “I didn’t know it was deep and quiet and grew upon a woman slowly, until one day she realizes it’s the very breath and smiles and tears of her life. Do you want to know the first thought in my head when Hadley Jones was shot? Thank God that wasn’t Nate. It felt horribly selfish to think such a thing at the time, but there it was. Thank God it wasn’t you.”
She reached for him, dissolving into tears, and he gathered her into his arms. She pressed her face against his chest. This was love, then: the safe feeling of his arms around her. His hand holding hers tightly in the cemetery when her mother’s grave had been disturbed, and him dragging her into the doctor’s office when his rival needed saving. There were the letters they’d exchanged, the poem, and the kitten. And it was more than just the two of them. There was the relationship between Nate and her father, and the growing one between Verity and his sisters. She and Nate had even played together as children.
All she’d ever had with Hadley Jones was a flirtation—an exciting and flattering one that she’d been too vain to give up.
She didn’t want to imagine a life without Nathaniel McClure in it.
Nate put a hand under her chin and lifted her face. She could see he was still befuddled, but her favorite smile in all the world was dawning as he realized this was going his way after all. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reason out what’s in your head,” he said.
“You can have as long as you like to try,” she said. “If you want to, that is.” She hadn’t forgotten that the ring was still enclosed in his fist.
He remembered then too, and promptly dropped to both knees, right in the middle of the orchard. “Verity Boone,” he said, “will you let me spend the rest of my life trying to reason you out? Will you raise our children—even though they’re bound to be stubborn, ornery little cusses? Will you let me struggle through your favorite poetry—even though I’ll probably never like it?”
“I can’t stand Gulliver and those ridiculous Lilliputians,” Verity said vehemently, “but I do love you, Nate.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, I will.” Laughing, Verity held out her hand. He grinned, knowing this time what he was supposed to do, and slid the ring back onto her finger. “Thank heavens you finally asked.”
He tugged her down on her knees beside him, and then he kissed her. Wrapping both arms around his neck, she reveled in the feel of his familiar body against hers and the absolute joy of knowing she never wanted any other lips but his on hers again.
Then her bottom hit the ground, and she protested halfheartedly, “Nate! My father . . .”
“He left,” Nate said between kisses. “Some time ag
o.”
Verity giggled as he lay down beside her on the grass of their orchard. When it came to love, she reflected, the poem might have left out one or two things.
The sky had been overcast in the early morning, but sunlight was breaking through the clouds in broad beams just as Ransloe Boone’s wagon came to a stop in front of the Mount Zion Church. Congregants arriving by carriage, wagon, and on foot were assembling inside for the Sunday service, but Verity looked immediately toward the cemetery grounds, wanting to see what work had been done.
Her father jumped off and offered her a hand down, and she smiled, remembering her first day in Catawissa when he had met her at the train station. Perhaps he remembered too, because after she was safely on the ground, he made a point of extending his arm, his lips curved in amusement. As Aunt Maryett had promised, it hadn’t taken Verity long to reteach him his manners. Together they passed by the front door of the church and strolled into the cemetery.
The wall that separated her mother’s grave from the rest had come down the day before, dismantled in a single afternoon by a handful of townspeople. Nate had been one of them. He promised Verity that the new wall would be finished before their wedding in the fall. Several members of the congregation had already pledged to contribute labor and materials. Some were men who’d done business with her father for years; others were families whose children had been delivered by Sarah Ann.
Setting aside any question about why these people hadn’t defended her mother fifteen years ago, Verity had thanked each one graciously. She knew from the diaries that Sarah Ann had demonstrated only kindness and charity in the face of ignorance and resentment, and Verity thought that Catawissa had long been suffering from the lack of her mother’s example. She didn’t know if she could fill those shoes, but she certainly planned to try.
When plans for the cemetery were being discussed and Reverend White lamented the impracticality of building the new wall around just the two women’s graves, Verity was quick to respond, “Surely you weren’t planning to exclude the Claytons?”
“Miss Boone,” the minister said, sighing, “you don’t know what kind of men they were.”
“No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But I assume they’ve accounted for their lives in the hereafter. I don’t think our cemetery is the place to pass judgment on them.” She lifted her chin. “That’s why, if Liza Thomas and her brothers want to put up a memorial stone for their mother, you’ll hear no objection from me.” She must have shamed him, for he dropped his eyes, and plans moved forward with no more complaints from Reverend White.
This morning’s sunlight washed the cemetery grounds in unaccustomed cheer, and Verity noticed that someone had left flowers at both Asenath’s and Sarah Ann’s headstones. Ransloe Boone stopped in front of his wife’s grave and removed his hat. Verity folded her gloved hands in front of her and sighed deeply.
Without that wall standing like an accusation, she thought, the two iron structures looked less like cages and more like decorative coverings for the graves. Perhaps, with additional flowers and ivy, she could improve their appearance further. They would, after all, be standing here a long time. Removing the cages would require disinterring the caskets, and she, her father, and Uncle John had decided to spare Sarah Ann and Asenath that indignity. Verity fancied that with a little effort, she might make “hooded graves” a new fashion.
Her father nodded in satisfaction at the openness of the cemetery grounds. “Your mother would be proud of you,” he said, replacing his hat on his head.
Verity looked up at him. “Do you think so?”
Ransloe Boone regarded his daughter with a smile. He wore a newly tailored frock coat this morning, livened with a fashionably wide necktie looped in a bow. “You’ve been here less than two months, and you’ve already changed all our lives. Yes, I think Sarah Ann would have been very proud.”
Verity slipped her hand back into the crook of his arm so that he could escort her inside for the service. “Father,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “I’m only just beginning.”
Author’s Note
THE CHARACTERS in The Caged Graves are fictional. However, there really are two caged graves in an abandoned cemetery outside the town of Catawissa, Pennsylvania. One belongs to Sarah Ann, wife of Ransloe Boone, and the other belongs to Asenath, wife of John Thomas. The women died within days of each other. Local historians have been able to prove they were sisters-in-law (John was Sarah Ann’s brother), but how they died and why the cages were erected over their graves remains a mystery.
Belief that the dead could rise from their graves and attack the living was not uncommon in North America in the nineteenth century, although the term “vampire” was not generally in use until after the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. The customary “cure” for the state of being undead was dismemberment of the corpse. I’ve based Rebecca Clayton’s treatment at the hands of her father on the story of Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island.
Although it seems like common sense today, most people of the mid-nineteenth century had no concept of germs and did not realize the importance of cleanliness when treating wounds. Some researchers were advocating sterilization of medical equipment, but many physicians were resistant to the idea. I may have stretched credibility when Hadley Jones insists on clean equipment, but by 1867 a number of articles on the subject had appeared in medical journals, and a young, open-minded doctor might have read and believed them.
The Poole family is loosely based on the Pool Tribe of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, believed to be descendants of the Native Americans who assisted the British at the Battle of Wyoming in 1778. The British soldiers and their Indian allies really did burn their way through the Wyoming Valley, killing civilians and executing some of their prisoners of war. It is believed that at least two American prisoners escaped, fleeing into the Shades of Death swamp. If one of those men carried a small fortune in gold coins, nobody is telling.
I hope that residents of Columbia County, Pennsylvania, will forgive me for the numerous geographical liberties I have taken with my fictional version of Catawissa.
Finally, I couldn’t have written this book alone, and I’d like to thank my agent, Sara Crowe, and my editor, Dinah Stevenson, as well as my critique partners, Marcy Hatch and Krystalyn Drown, and beta readers Andrea Burdette, Gwen Dandridge, Katie Mills, Al and Kay Past, Sri Upadhyay, and Lori Walker. My entire family supported me in this project, but I want to especially thank my daughters, Gabrielle and Gina, for their outspoken opinions (!), my sister, Laurie, for a timely comment, my brother-in-law, Larry, for his expertise on nineteenth-century firearms, and my husband, Bob, for tracking down the location of the real caged graves.
About the Author
DIANNE K. SALERNI was inspired to write this novel after finding two real-life caged graves. She is a fifth grade teacher and children’s book author who lives in New London, Pennsylvania. Visit her website at www.highspiritsbook.com.
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