“I’m so sorry,” Thaddeus said. “I thought I’d done fairly well by him. I wish he’d let me know. I could have helped more.”
“You had your own troubles at the time,” Sally said, “and more since. Morgan tells me your good lady has passed on.”
“Yes, although we had some fine years, even at the end.”
“I’m glad for the good years and sorry for the loss,” she said. “Any road, we fetched up here just after the girls were born and Morgan thought it was time to settle for a bit. The job here came up and he writes well enough to keep the burial records. Most don’t like the work, you see, dealing with dead bodies all the time, so there wasn’t much competition, and the job came with the house as well.” She peered at Thaddeus anxiously. “He hasn’t given up, you know, on the preaching. This is just until we’re better situated, and then he’ll try again.”
“I know he will,” Thaddeus said. “If there’s one thing Morgan has, it’s persistence.”
“Here he is,” Sally said, turning to look as Morgan appeared in the doorway, a gaggle of children crowding in behind him. Thaddeus had to look carefully to see that there were, in fact, only four of them, and even then he had to take a second look to assure himself that he wasn’t seeing double. Judging by the way they were dressed, there were two girls and two boys, but they looked so much like each other that without the clue their clothing offered, any one of them might have been mistaken for any of the others. He judged them to be perhaps eight or nine years old — at the gangly stage — but the lankiness could well be another trait they had inherited from their mother along with carroty-red hair and an extraordinary number of freckles.
“Mr. Lewis! It’s so good to see you again.” Morgan entered the room, his hand out in greeting.
The years had in no way improved Morgan Spicer’s appearance, Thaddeus thought. He was still scrawny and unkempt-looking, with lank hair and a straggly beard, his clothing cheap and ill-fitting. As Thaddeus looked more closely, though, he realized that Morgan stood a little straighter perhaps, and had developed a grave and deliberate way of moving. He could well have cultivated this mien because he felt it was appropriate for a minister, but it would certainly be fitting for his current occupation as well. Although, Thaddeus supposed, an effort at solemnity would be largely wasted on the customary clientele of a Potter’s Field. At a Strangers’ Burying Ground, there would be few mourning relatives on hand to usher the dead into the earth.
“Pardon me for not rising,” Thaddeus said. “I’ve grown older since last I saw you.”
Spicer sat in the opposite chair and beamed. “Those were good days, weren’t they? When you and I rode together.”
Thaddeus nodded, although he by no means agreed with this statement. They had been hard days, the whole colony stirred into an uproar by rebellion and invasion, and all the while a murderer was stalking young women. He and Spicer tracked the villain down, but Thaddeus had been shaken to the core by the experience.
The mob of children had filed into the room in Morgan’s wake and now stood in a row against the wall, their collective gaze fixed on their father’s unexpected visitor.
“These are our children,” Sally said. “Ruth and Rebecca, Matthew and Mark. Children, this is Mr. Lewis, who is a very old friend of your father’s. Or I guess that’s a friend of long acquaintance, isn’t it? Not an old friend.”
“Either way is appropriate, I’m afraid,” Thaddeus said. “Are these quadruplets?” He found their unwavering stares slightly disconcerting.
Sally shook her head. “No, two sets of twins. The boys are a year older than the girls, but they’re at that age where the girls outgrow the boys. They all look the same right now, don’t they?
Thaddeus had to agree. The duplication was astonishing.
“You go off now and leave your father to talk with Mr. Lewis,” she said to them. “Go play outside.”
The expressions on the twins’ faces didn’t change as they obediently filed out of the room.
“They’ve been a chore in some ways,” Sally said, “coming as they did in batches. But now that they’re older, all they want to do is follow their father around. Now, would you have tea, Mr. Lewis?” When Thaddeus nodded, she disappeared again, presumably to the kitchen.
“I was surprised when Luke mentioned that he’d seen you,” Thaddeus said to Morgan.
“No more surprised than I was when I heard you were in the area as well. I mistook your son for you, when I saw him on the street, but he set me straight and promised to pass my message on. He’s the new doctor then? The one that’s taken over from Christie?”
“Not really taking over. Assisting would be a better word.”
Morgan nodded. “Christie’s a good doctor, but he’s a bit odd. He always acts like he’ll look after your ailment if you insist, but that he would really rather be somewhere else.”
“I think that’s why he took Luke on,” Thaddeus pointed out. “So he can be somewhere else. Whatever his reasons, his decision certainly aided our plans. Luke needed a position and I needed a place to stay occasionally. But tell me about you and Sally.”
“Sally’s a grand woman, for sure. We seem to produce children only in pairs, but she’s wonderful with them. It helps that we’re settled now. It’s better for all of us.”
“She mentioned that you still hope to find a congregation somewhere.”
Morgan glanced at the doorway before he replied in a low voice. “That’s what I pretend — to Sally if not to myself — but I don’t think that’s what I’m meant to do. You know, I used to think that it would be such a fine thing to be on the road, to ride to a different town every day. See new sights. Meet new people. It wasn’t so fine after I’d done it for awhile. To tell the truth, it got tiresome. And I like it here well enough. It seems almost as good, dealing with dead souls instead of the live ones. I take care of them. And after all, I already know all about gravestones, don’t I?”
Thaddeus recalled then that Spicer was once apprenticed to old Mr. Kemp, the gravestone maker in Demorestville, before he had taken it in his head to go off preaching. It would not be so dissimilar an occupation, he supposed.
“I’m just sorry that the job won’t last, that’s all,” Morgan said. “I may have to start looking for something else soon.”
“Why? Surely dead bodies are a commodity that’s in steady supply at a cemetery?”
“Some of the local businessmen want to petition the legislature to close the grounds so they can be given over to more shops and houses. They say the village will never amount to anything as long as it has a cemetery in the middle of it.”
“But what about the people already buried here?”
“They’d move them all over to the new Necropolis. There’s been talk of it for years, but the Board of Trustees seems to be taking the notion seriously this time.” Spicer shrugged. “The grounds are getting full anyway, so even if nothing happens, I probably wouldn’t be needed that much longer.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Just then Sally reappeared with a pot of tea and two mugs on a tray. She set it down on the table. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” she said. “I know Morgan has something to ask you.”
“Yes, your puzzle,” Thaddeus said. “Luke delivered your entire message, you know. He said you needed my advice on something.”
“Something very odd happened, and I’d like your opinion of it.” Morgan briefly filled him in on the strange desecration, and the constable’s reaction to it. “I don’t see how it could have been grave robbers,” he said. “And I don’t believe it was hooligans, either. They seldom do more than topple the grave markers.”
“I agree, although I must admit that my first thought would have been of resurrectionists.”
“They weren’t interested in the body. They threw it aside. He wasn’t very fresh anyway. He had been in the grave a long time. He died in 1848.”
“Then there must have been something of value in the coffin.”<
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“I don’t understand how that could be. The man had no relatives and was buried by the county,” Morgan said. “But if there was anything there, it was taken.”
“Who, exactly, was it who was dug up?” Thaddeus asked.
“A man by the name of Abraham Jenkins.”
“And who was he?”
“I don’t know. Just another poor soul who died alone, as far as I can tell. I don’t even know how old he was. There wasn’t a birthdate to put on the stone. He died of a pain in the stomach, but other than that, there was no other information in the record.”
It certainly wasn’t much to go on, Thaddeus thought, but in the interest of being thorough, he supposed he should have a look at the disturbed grave itself.
Morgan led him out of the cottage to the laneway that led through the burying ground. The twins materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and followed them, a little parade that straggled past a small building in the centre of the cemetery. A chapel, perhaps? Or a deadhouse? Probably useful for either function, Thaddeus figured.
Morgan turned into one of the right-hand rows and stopped in front of a grave with loose soil heaped over it. As soon as their father stopped, the twins hunkered down on their haunches to watch, two of them with thumbs in their mouths. They were like little imprinted chicks, Thaddeus thought, programmed by nature to follow. Morgan appeared not to notice that they were there.
“This is it,” he said.
The raw soil looked out of place next to its undisturbed neighbours, but that was the only extraordinary thing about it as far as Thaddeus could see. Abraham Jenkins’s headstone revealed little. It was a plain square piece of granite, as befitted one buried by charity, with a simple statement of name and date of death. Other than the fact that the grass on the nearby graves had been trampled and suffered a spade mark or two, there was nothing nearby that offered any other clue.
Thaddeus made a slow survey of the grounds. It was an old-style cemetery, more thought given to the efficient use of space than to the comfort of dead souls, the graves laid out in regimented rows with a minimum of space left between them. It would be a sorry place to spend eternity, Thaddeus reflected, but then, he supposed, it provided a last resting place for the sorriest of people.
Nearly the entire ground appeared to be filled, except for small empty sections at the back, and there was no direction in which it could be expanded. Yonge Street and the concession line along Tollgate Road hemmed it in on two sides. Buildings crowded up against it on the other two.
“Show me where they went over the fence.”
Morgan led him to the back of the cemetery, the twins flapping in a line behind them.
“I think it must have been here,” he said. “At least this is where they ran to when I surprised them.” And then he stood back and waited while Thaddeus examined the fence and stared at the buildings beyond it. There was nothing at all remarkable about any of it: an ordinary paling fence and a huddle of wooden houses. He turned and walked back to the gravesite, but the backside view of it was no more informative than the front side had been.
“Can you think of any reason at all why they would have chosen this particular body to dig up?” he asked.
Morgan shook his head. “No. The grave has been here for several years. There’s nothing special about the headstone that marks it. Nothing special about the person in it. I have no idea why this happened.”
Thaddeus knew that Morgan was expecting him to discover some piece of information or small item that would set them on a path to resolution of the mystery, but there seemed to be nothing that suggested so much as a line of inquiry. He would make a circuit of the grounds, he decided, just to be thorough, but he had little expectation that anything useful would come of it.
As soon as he moved, Morgan made to follow.
“Just stay here for a minute,” Thaddeus said. “I’ll shout if I have any questions.”
To his relief, the children stayed with their father. He was finding their presence hugely distracting.
The burial ground wasn’t large, only five or six acres in all, he judged. Back in the 1820s, when the field was established, no one could have foreseen that there would be so many strangers to bury, although it had obviously found favour with some affluent families, as well, for here and there more elaborate stone and marble memorials towered over the plain blocks that were planted for the indigents. He went up and down the rows, idly scanning the information recorded on the markers. Most of the names meant nothing to him, but one small slab with two familiar names caught his attention. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were buried here, a fact that he had not known, but he supposed he should have guessed it. When Mackenzie fled the colony after his failed rebellion, it was Lount and Matthews who were fingered as ringleaders. In spite of pleas from across the colony, they were both hanged and their bodies buried with strangers. Ironic that Mackenzie himself had now been welcomed back, all forgiven. Thaddeus wondered whether or not the little rebel had ever visited the graves of the men he had led to their deaths.
He continued his survey, but no clues presented themselves. The key to the riddle must lie elsewhere. He returned to where Morgan was waiting, his brood of identical children hunkered at his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Thaddeus said. “I can’t see anything that would explain what happened, unless someone was after the body itself. And without knowing who he was, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever think of any reason for him to have been dug up.”
Morgan’s face fell. “At least you tried, which is more than the constable was willing to do. Ah, well, come back inside and we’ll finish our tea.”
Thaddeus’s first inclination was to protest that he needed to be getting back, but then he realized that both Luke and Dr. Christie were no doubt occupied, and that there would be little for him to do and no one for him to talk to at the doctor’s house. Better to chew over old times with Morgan and Sally, he decided, even if it meant being subjected to the unwavering stares of the twins. Maybe he’d get used to them.
Chapter 5
Luke sat in the armchair behind the big desk in the office, glumly trying to ignore Mul-Sack’s toothy grin. After breakfast Dr. Christie disappeared into the kitchen with Mrs. Dunphy. Thaddeus went off in search of Morgan Spicer, not even stopping to ask the way to the Burying Ground. No doubt, Luke figured, he already knew where it was.
His father and Dr. Christie seemed to hit it off. That was a relief. Although Luke’s rooms were ostensibly his home now, they didn’t feel like it, and he was too aware that he was living in someone else’s house. Christie was more than gracious in welcoming Thaddeus, but the dynamic of the household could have been difficult had the two men detested each other on sight.
It seemed very odd to Luke to be doing nothing after the frantic years at medical school, when every day was filled to more than capacity with knowledge that must be learned, tasks that must be done. No one had told him that real doctoring would entail long periods of waiting for something to happen, yet he knew that no one would call for a doctor unless there was an accident, or some illness that swept through the village. He would need to find something to keep himself occupied while he waited for calamity to strike the residents of Yorkville.
Books: Dr. Christie had whole shelves of them. It was books that had led him to the shop in the little lane off Notre Dame Street in Montreal. As soon as he’d arrived in the city he had gravitated to the cluster of booksellers on St. Vincent Street, drawn both by the knowledge their books contained and the warmth of the shops. Most of the texts he needed for school were sold, usually at exorbitant prices, at the university, but all of the Montreal book dealers had small sections of medical books. Some of the titles were on the local curriculum, but many of them were obscure, out-of-step with current medical theory, or English and French translations of foreign texts. Even so, he browsed through these as long as he dared, in particular lingering over the illustrations of anatomy, trying to absorb as much as he could in
preparation for the lectures he would hear during his classes. Most of the proprietors of the shops chased him away after half an hour or so, cautioning him to either buy or be gone.
Ferguson’s was different. To begin with, it wasn’t in the heart of the bookselling district, but just at the periphery of it. The tall, thin proprietor seemed not to mind how long Luke dawdled in front of the heaped tables and shelves of books, or how long he stood in the aisle reading them. It was a tiny shop, crowded with bookcases and bins and racks, but there was a stove in the corner that filled the space with a fragrant heat that seeped into his frozen limbs. He stood for hours, comfortably lost in the mysteries of the human body.
Eventually Luke hadn’t bothered with any of the other shops. As the season turned to a hard winter, he tramped along the snowy streets to Ferguson’s, where he consulted the texts on matters that had puzzled him during the day’s classes. He seldom bothered to stop at his room first. The temperature in the attic was only a few degrees warmer than outside and he knew that he would not be able to study there. He would fall into a fitful sleep, huddled under a thin blanket with his coat still on. At least at Ferguson’s he could accomplish something useful.
And when he tired of tracing the veins and arteries and muscles shown by the illustrated plates in the medical books, and when he grew weary of reading about the symptoms of the many complaints that could plague a human body, he turned to some of the bookstore’s other offerings. He found a wealth of literature — accounts of daring explorations and doomed expeditions, memoirs and biographies, bins full of maps, shelves full of novels and stories. He delved into these and stood with his nose in them until hunger or closing time chased him out of the shop.
The Burying Ground Page 4