“Are you there, Rachel?” she asked tentatively. She felt a little foolish, talking to a ghost, talking to something she couldn’t see. “Rachel, if you’re there, tell us—tell me—what you want? Do you want to stay or go?”
For an instant, Ruby thought she heard a soft sob, the faintest sound of anguished weeping, coming from a distant place. But the mockingbird chose that moment to set up a cheerful, noisy chatter, and when he stopped gossiping, the weeping was gone, or perhaps it had never been, or had been only in her mind.
Still—Ruby cast an apprehensive glance over her shoulder and was absurdly relieved to see that the iron cemetery gate stood open, propped by the solid rock Claire had put there. She comforted herself with the thought that it would take a hefty ghost to move that rock, although maybe the undead weren’t bound by the same physical laws that held the living.
But then her eye was caught by something lying on the brick walk a few paces away from the open gate, a white silk handkerchief maybe. That’s odd, she thought—I don’t remember seeing that when we came in. She went back along the walk to pick it up and saw, to her astonishment, that it was a perfect white rose, so fresh that there were crystal drops of dew, like tears, on the petals. She was holding it in her hand, staring at it and hardly daring to breathe, when Claire called out to her.
“Ruby, I’ve found Aunt Hazel’s marker.”
Ruby went toward her, carrying the rose in her open hand. “Claire,” she said shakily, “Claire, tell me that you dropped this when I wasn’t looking.” She held it out.
“Dropped that rose?” Clair shook her head, frowning. “No, of course I didn’t. I’ve never brought any flowers up here. I—” She looked up and saw Ruby’s face. “Why are you asking? Where did you find it?”
“Lying on the brick walk, just inside the gate. I’m sure it wasn’t there when we came in—or when we went back to keep the gate from closing.”
“It wasn’t.” Claire’s voice was flat and matter-of-fact. “She dropped it, Ruby. Rachel. She left it for us, so we’d know she was here.”
Ruby bit her lip. She herself had seen Rachel’s ghost this morning, carrying a basket of roses. It shouldn’t be hard to believe that Rachel had followed them into the cemetery and left the rose for them to find. No, it wasn’t hard, it was unsettling, unnerving. Just another small testimony to the frightening strangeness of this place.
Ruby bent over and laid the rose at the foot of Augustus Blackwood’s cross. There you are, Rachel, she said silently. I’ve left it for him. I hope you approve.
She straightened up. “You found your aunt’s marker, you said?”
“Over here,” Claire said, taking her arm. “No wonder I didn’t see it right away. It’s totally buried in green stuff.”
The three stone crosses lined up in a row along the back fence were almost completely hidden in a tangle of weeds and widow’s tears, its blue blooms spilling everywhere.
“Mother always said she didn’t want to leave Aunt Hazel here alone,” Claire said quietly. “She thought it was a lonely place.” She turned to look at the row of Blackwood graves. “But now I’m not so sure. Hazel loved old Mrs. Blackwood, and this place—especially the woods.” In a lower voice, she added, “Maybe she loved Rachel’s children, too, and her husband, even if they died before she came here.”
The first of the three crosses stood at the head of what was still a visible gravesite. It bore the name Hazel Penland but no date.
“Hazel wanted her marker to look like the others,” Claire said. “I didn’t understand that, then. Now I think I do.” She pointed. “That’s the family, there—all seven of them. These three, they’re the servants, or helpers, or whatever. Aunt Hazel didn’t like to think of herself as a servant, but I suppose that’s what she was. And that’s probably what Patsy and Colleen were. Servants.”
Those were the names on the remaining two crosses: Patsy Hill and Colleen O’Reilly. Both names were barely legible, the stones battered by the elements and covered with lichen and moss. Colleen O’Reilly’s cross bore something else, but whatever it was, it was so weathered that it could not be read.
Colleen O’Reilly. Ruby frowned, feeling an odd tug at her memory. Gram Gifford’s mother, Ruby’s great-grandmother. Her name was Colleen, wasn’t it? Or was it Corinne? No, Colleen, it had been Colleen. And her last name might have been O’Reilly. But it had been a long time since Gram had mentioned it, and Ruby couldn’t remember for sure. Kids don’t pay a lot of attention to family history. Perhaps it had been O’Ryan. Of course O’Reilly (O’Ryan, too, for that matter) was a common Irish name, as common as Jones or Smith. And Colleen—well, every Irish family had to have at least one Colleen among the girls. Still, the longer Ruby stared at the cross, the more certain she felt that her great-grandmother’s name had been Colleen, not Corinne. Colleen O’Reilly.
Anyway, Gram had told her once that her mother had been carried out to sea in a great storm and drowned, when Gram herself was so young that she barely remembered it. Gram and her grandmother, whose name Ruby had never heard or didn’t remember, had lived through the same storm. After that, the two of them had moved to San Antonio, where her grandmother had done her best to bring her up, working at two jobs so Gram could go to college, back in the day when a young woman was only encouraged to get married. But Gram’s eyes always filled with tears when she talked about the last time she saw her mother, going bravely back out into the storm to help someone she cared for. Ruby, still a little girl, hadn’t wanted to make her favorite grandmother unhappy, so with a child’s tact, she had never asked for the whole story.
Maybe the story was here, Ruby thought. But how could that be? Colleen O’Reilly was lost at sea, not buried in a lonely Texas graveyard. She stood very still, looking down at the cross. The graveyard, which had been full of birdsong a moment ago, suddenly seemed to go silent. She felt colder, more remote. She was beginning to feel a shimmer. There was something about the cross, something that pulled her, something that could tell her—
“Ruby,” Claire called. “I’ve found something, here on the angel. Come and take a look. I can’t quite read it. Maybe you’ll be able to make it out.”
Ruby felt the shimmer disappear—for the first time, regretfully. Claire was kneeling down, examining the pedestal. Then she picked up a stick and began scraping away some of the moss.
“What is it?” Ruby asked, going over to her.
“Don’t know,” Claire replied. “The carving is almost worn away. All I can make out are two words. Looks like My Angels.”
“My angels?” Ruby repeated.
“Yeah. There’s more engraving, but I can’t read it. Can you?”
Ruby bent over and peered at the rough-cut stone. She could decipher the shapes of letters and some numbers, but not clearly enough to know what they were. “Sorry,” she said, straightening up. “All I can make out are those two words.’”
Claire stood up. “Now I’m really curious. I think if I bring a knife or a paint scraper or something like that, I can get some more of this stuff off. There might be a date under all this moss. And if we knew the date, we might be able to figure out what—”
Claire’s words were obliterated by a simultaneous, blinding flash of lightning and a teeth-rattling, ear-splitting clap of thunder. About fifty yards away, along the edge of the woods, a tall pine tree was split by a bolt of lightning. It exploded like a detonating bomb, hurling showers of sparks and huge chunks of broken, splintered wood in every direction. The iron fence around the cemetery seemed to vibrate, and the air was filled with the smell of smoke.
For a second, Ruby and Claire froze. “Holy cow,” Claire breathed. Her eyes were huge and staring in her white face. “Ruby, I’ve never seen anything like that before. That was close! We could have been killed!”
Ruby’s ears were ringing and her heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. “Come on, let’s run,” she said urgently, heading for the gate. “If our ghost is throwing thunderbolts, I’d rat
her be a moving target.”
Chapter Twelve
Herbs and flowers often figure in both personal and political history. Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife Josephine loved violets. She wore them on her wedding day, and Napoleon sent her a bouquet of purple violets every year on their anniversary. He adopted the violet as his political emblem, and when he was banished to Elba, he promised to “return with the violets.” While he was in exile, his followers defied the law by wearing the flower as an emblem of their faithfulness to him. After Waterloo, Napoleon reportedly visited Josephine’s grave, picked a few violets he found growing there, and kept them in a locket he wore until his own death.
In the language of flowers, the violet represents love and faithfulness.
China Bayles
“Herbs and Flowers That Tell a Story”
Pecan Springs Enterprise
The sky remained ominously dark and threatening, especially toward the east and south, where heavy gray clouds were dropping sheer curtains of silvery rain. There was another lightning strike on the other side of the creek, another flash and loud crash. But only a few large, warm splatters came down on Ruby and Claire as they ran to the house, and they managed to get back without getting very wet.
Ruby picked up her bag from the kitchen and Claire showed her to her room upstairs. After the grandeur of the rooms on the main floor—and the ghostly presence—Ruby didn’t know quite what to expect. Something dark and frightening, maybe, or somehow misaligned in its dimensions, like the outside of the house. In which case, Ruby had decided, she would suggest that she and Claire sleep together, for company, and comfort.
But there was nothing out of the ordinary about the room, and nothing very personal about it, either. There were no pictures on the wall, nothing to indicate who might have slept here. It was simply a large, high-ceilinged bedroom pleasantly wallpapered in light blue flowers above a white-painted beadboard wainscot, a pair of twin beds spread with blue coverlets against one wall, and a blue rug on the polished wooden floor.
“Nice,” Ruby said approvingly, looking around. The room was furnished with an old-fashioned white-painted dresser and mirror, a chifforobe, and a rocking chair with a blue print cushion. The chair sat in front of a tall, white-curtained window, which looked out over the creek running through the green meadow at the foot of a long, low wooded hill.
“I thought you’d like the view from this window,” Claire said, going to the door. Carelessly, over her shoulder, she said, “In case anything bothers you in the night, my room is right through that door.” She pointed to a white-painted door in the wall beside one of the beds. “Just come on in and wake me up—if I’m not awake already.”
“Bothers me?” Ruby asked, frowning apprehensively. “Like…how?”
“Well…” Claire hesitated. “I sometimes hear sobbing. And water dripping. And the wind.”
Ruby thought of the sobs she had heard—well, almost heard—in the cemetery. “What else?”
Another hesitation. “I don’t think there’s anything that will hurt you, if that’s what you’re asking,” Claire said, a little stiffly. “If I did, I probably wouldn’t be here myself. And I certainly wouldn’t have invited you to come.”
“I didn’t mean that, exactly,” Ruby said, although she had been wondering, a little nervously, if there was any danger. So far, the manifestations hadn’t seemed threatening, but—
“It’s all very scary, I know.” Claire sighed. “But I’ve never sensed anything malicious or evil about any of it. I think we’ll be okay.” She added, “The bathroom is two doors down on the left, just past my room. Come down to the kitchen whenever you’re ready. I was thinking spaghetti for supper—store-bought sauce and definitely non-gourmet, but it’s easy. And we have the salad fixings that Kitty left, and some hard-boiled eggs.” She gave a short laugh. “I’d offer you some wine, but I don’t keep it in the house, for obvious reasons.”
“I can do without wine,” Ruby said. “But don’t forget the pie. Oh, and let’s eat in the morning room, if it’s okay with you. There’s something about that kitchen—” She shivered.
“What’s the matter?” Claire asked, making a comic face. “You’re afraid Rachel might whap us over the head with a skillet?”
“I agree—she doesn’t seem to be the malicious type,” Ruby replied lightly. “But that’s what people said about Lizzie Borden. And don’t forget that we were very nearly fried by that lightning bolt.” They both laughed as Claire left the room.
As Ruby unpacked, she glanced out the window and saw a white-tailed doe with a pair of twin spotted fawns at her side, coming down to the creek to drink. Mother and babies—a reminder, somehow, of the mute cluster of small, sad stone crosses in the cemetery. What had happened here? How had those children, and their father, died? Had Rachel herself committed some unthinkable crime and been sentenced to mourn forever in this house?
And what about the three other people who were buried in the cemetery? Hazel Penland was Claire’s aunt—there wasn’t much mystery about her. But who were Patsy Hill and Colleen O’Reilly? Had they lived here, servants in the house before Claire’s aunt came? Which would have been when? What year? Ruby realized that she didn’t know, and made a mental note to ask Claire.
Colleen O’Reilly. Ruby stood still in the middle of the room, feeling suddenly that she needed to know who that person was. She focused, trying to remember what Gram Gifford had said about her mother—whose name, Ruby was now sure, had been Colleen O’Reilly. But the conversations had been so long ago, in another life almost, and nothing came, nothing more than the recollection of hearing Gram say that her mother had died in a storm—swept out to sea when she went to help a friend. And there wasn’t anybody left on that side of the family who could fill in the blanks.
Still thinking, Ruby pulled off her sundress and hung it in the closet, then changed into a pair of comfortable jeans and a green-and-peach striped pullover and went out into the hall, where she stood for a moment getting her bearings. Claire was busy in the kitchen—maybe now would be a good time to do a little exploring. If she remembered right, Claire had said the nursery was on the second floor.
Ruby’s room was at one end of the hallway, opposite the stair. Along the hall, there were four doors on each side, eight altogether. Claire had said her room was the next door on the left, so Ruby skipped that one, then opened the other doors one by one. She didn’t have to turn the lights on. A strange, pearly gray twilight hung over the house, and the windows in each room and at the ends of the hall let in enough light so that she could see.
On the other side of Claire’s bedroom, the bathroom was large and old-fashioned, with a deep claw-foot tub, a white tile floor, and a porcelain sink with a medicine cabinet and mirror over it. The walls were the same pale yellow as the morning room downstairs, and the room smelled of fresh paint—one of Claire’s fix-up projects, Ruby guessed.
The four bedrooms on the other side of the hall were about the same size as Ruby’s, but with green wallpaper, or lavender, beige, or yellow, each one furnished with a bureau, a chair, and a bed with a coverlet in the same color as the wallpaper. But none of them felt occupied or personal—no pictures on the wall, nothing but the minimum of furniture. If anyone—the children, especially—had slept in these rooms for any length of time, they had left nothing of themselves behind. But then Ruby remembered Claire saying that Mr. Hoover had packed up the china from the dining room and some of the things in the music room, with the idea of renting the house. Maybe any personal items from the bedrooms had been packed, as well.
The bedroom on the other side of the bathroom was more spacious and much better furnished, with a huge arched headboard and footboard carved out of some sort of dark, highly polished wood. There was a mirrored dresser and a matching bureau to match, a gilt-framed full-length chevron mirror in the corner, and an ornately patterned rug in shades of red and blue covering most of the floor. It had to be the master bedroom, Ruby thought, where Rachel and
Augustus had slept, although this room, like the others, had been stripped of anything personal. There were no family photographs, no toilet articles, not even a doily. She stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for—what? She didn’t know, except that even though there was a kind of bleak emptiness to the room, she was beginning to feel uncomfortably like a voyeur, as if she were intruding on the privacy of the people who had slept together here, made love here, conceived their children here. She closed the door very quietly, not even allowing the latch to click.
There was one room left, the last room on the left, just past the master bedroom. She guessed, as she put her hand to the polished brass doorknob, that it was the nursery. Remembering Claire’s nervousness about the room, she opened it an inch, then wider, and finally stepped inside. The room was painted yellow, with a low, narrow, white-painted bed beside the window, a ruffled pillow at the head, a ruffled yellow-and-blue quilt spread over it. In the wall across from the bed was a connecting doorway into the master bedroom, Ruby thought. Beside the door was a white chifforobe decorated with painted baby animals and flowers. Next to the window stood a child’s red-painted rocking chair, twin to the one in the music room downstairs.
But unlike the other rooms, this one seemed to hold a number of personal things, for under the window, white-painted shelves displayed a trio of small stuffed brown bears, a red-and-blue ball, a box of wooden alphabet blocks, a painted metal box with a handle on the side—a jack-in-the-box, likely—and several books. But the toys and the books were all new looking, Ruby noticed. Not new in the sense of modern, for they definitely had an old-fashioned, Victorian look. They were new in the sense of unused.
That’s odd, Ruby thought. Frowning, she went over and picked up a small brown bear. Then, suddenly, she felt the shimmer begin, felt herself being pulled, involuntarily, into the bear. But this time she didn’t raise her defenses. Instead, she went with the feeling, letting herself go, trying to get a sense, through the little bear, of the child to whom it had belonged, the child who loved it. Little Angela, perhaps? As the baby of the family, just three when she died, Angela would surely have slept in this room, where her mother could hear her and comfort her when she cried. But there was no one who could comfort Rachel. Rachel, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted for they were dead.
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