The Burying Ground

by Janet Kellough

  “Quite incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Did he show you the drawings he made?”

  “Yes, and I think his plan to publish them is sound. There’s a new interest in the mechanics of how the world works. The Great Exhibition proved that. On the other hand, it’s too bad that his pastime is so innocent. Christie as a grave robber would have provided an easy solution to Morgan’s puzzle. I’m not sure where this leaves us in terms of finding the culprit. Of course, if it had been Christie, the consequences would have been a bit awkward for you, wouldn’t they?”

  “To say the least,” Luke replied. “And for you, as well. Do you think Mr. Spicer would mind if I had a look at the cemetery ledger?”

  “I don’t think you’ll find anything there,” Thaddeus said. “We’ve been over it and over it.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Luke said. ”I don’t really expect to find anything. But you never know, sometimes a second eye can pick out something that the first missed.” Especially when the second eye already knew what was going on, he thought. Surely there’s something there that will lead to the right graves.

  Sally answered the door. “I chased Morgan off to bed already,” she said. “The grass has grown up so much with the rain it’s taken him three days to cut it. He’s about done in. I’ll get the twins settled, then I’ll come and sit with you.”

  Thaddeus stopped her as she turned to go. “May we have another look at the ledger while we wait?

  “Of course.” She went to the cupboard and fetched it down. “I’ll be very happy if you manage to find something. I’ve had enough of this nonsense. Morgan is wearing himself out.”

  “There you go,” Thaddeus said, handing the book to Luke. “Do your worst.”

  “What was the name of the first one again?” he asked.

  “Abraham Jenkins. It’s quite a long way in. The records go all the way back to when the cemetery first opened.

  Luke flipped forward until he found the name. Date of death, cause of death, date of burial. Nothing more.

  “And the second?”

  “Isaiah Marshall.”

  He found it a few entries later. Again, nothing but a few sketchy details of his death. He scanned the names listed between the two. Nothing. He flipped the pages backward. Nothing. He leafed forward a few pages. Nothing. There were no tell-tale initials beside any of the names. Nothing that would tie any of the deaths to the name Van Hansel. Nothing that would tell him where Hands had hidden his fortune. He closed the ledger.

  “Well?” Thaddeus said.

  “Nothing that I can see.” He shrugged. “I thought it might be worth looking.” He was disappointed that he could see no clue that his father might have missed, although he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Morgan and Thaddeus would have searched it thoroughly long since. “So what is your plan? Do we just sit here until something happens?”

  “Would you prefer to sit outside in the rain?”

  “I don’t think it’s actually raining anymore. We might stand a better chance of catching someone if we were in the graveyard.”

  “We might stand a better chance of scaring them off, too,” Thaddeus pointed out. “Besides, if anything happens tonight, it won’t be until later, when it’s dark. It was nearly twelve the night someone tried to get into the cottage.”

  Luke had forgotten about the attempted break-in at the Keeper’s Lodge. It must have been Lavinia, hoping to steal away the ledger. Or more likely Cherub, who seemed willing to do whatever Lavinia asked of her.

  “We could take turns watching,” Luke said. He knew that as much as Thaddeus was itching to solve the puzzle Morgan had sent his way, he would grumble at sitting in a damp graveyard for hours. “Why don’t we go outside now while there’s still a little light, and decide on the best place to wait?”

  It was as good an excuse as any he could think of to search the graveyard for something that might help Lavinia. If he found nothing, there was little more he could do. He would have to report that he had done his best and hope it was enough. She had blackmailed Perry, and when he failed, she turned her attention to Luke. If he failed, he could only hope that she would look elsewhere.

  “I suppose we could wander around for a while,” Thaddeus said, and then his resolve seemed to firm up. “Yes, that makes sense.”

  They rose from the table and went outside. The rain had stopped and sunlight began to break through the dispersing clouds. Luke stood and surveyed the Burying Ground. Unlike the newer cemeteries there was little shelter, just row after row of graves, shoehorned closely together. There were a few trees growing along the back fence, but other than those, the chapel or the cottage itself were the only features large enough to effectively hide a man.

  “Which way do you suppose they’ll come, if they come at all?” Luke asked.

  “It would make most sense to climb the fence at the back, where the buildings would screen you,” Thaddeus said. “Although they did come through the front gates the second time.”

  “Then this side of the chapel would provide the best shelter. It would hide you no matter which way they came.”

  “Agreed. Now let’s go back inside. You can take the first watch later.”

  “I’ll just look around a bit, then I’ll join you.”

  Thaddeus returned to the cottage. Luke set off down the pathway, making a show of stopping to look around now and again, just in case his father was watching out the window. There wasn’t a great deal to see. Here and there a family had put up a marble headstone, but the majority of the markers were plain slabs of granite with the barest of details inscribed on them. He reached a point halfway down the grounds and ambled over to the mound of earth that still lay raw over the Jenkins grave. Morgan had replaced the marker when he reburied the body, but Luke could find nothing that differentiated it from any of the stones beside it. He wandered through the graveyard until he came to Isaiah Marshall’s grave.

  He could see nothing there that was out of the ordinary either. His investigation appeared to have reached an end. Disappointed, he rounded the row to walk back to the lodge. Just as he turned, a shaft of sunlight briefly lit the back of Marshall’s stone, illuminating a small scratch in the granite. It was barely noticeable, just a small mark a few inches from the bottom, something that at first glance could well have been ascribed to the scrape of a shovel. And that would have been hidden by grass before Morgan had ruthlessly scythed it to the ground. Luke bent down for a closer look, and once he saw it clearly, he was astonished that no one had noticed it before. It was a tiny, entwined O and P. The same mark that was on the doorframes of the taverns Perry had taken him to; the same mark that was a recognized symbol of welcome for men like him. He stood up, then bent to look again. It was unmistakable.

  Had Isaiah Marshall been like Luke, a man who had to hide in the shadows? An outcast? Marshall had been a carpenter. Had he worked for Fraser and Hess, who in turn worked for Van Hansel? Had Hands known all about Marshall, and used his coffin as a treasury, confident that no one would come questioning if someone were to dig it up one night? It made sense. And how many more like Marshall were buried here?

  Luke wanted to run up and down the rows to check the backs of the stones, but mindful that Thaddeus might be watching, he forced himself to move slowly. He couldn’t waste too much time, though — the sun was starting to slip below the horizon. It would soon be too dark to see clearly. Then he realized that the old-fashioned layout of the Burying Ground would work to his advantage. The graves were arranged in strict rows, the coffins buried in the order in which they had arrived. Anthony Hawke’s investigation into the embezzlement of funds at the Toronto Fever Hospital had begun in 1847, and with no conclusions reached, petered out sometime in 1848. Hands would have no need to hide his money so thoroughly once the investigation drew to a close. Luke need only examine the stones that were planted in 1847 or 1848 in order to discover if there were any more marked graves. And they were all laid out in tidy
rows for him.

  As he walked from Isaiah Marshall to Abraham Jenkins he looked closely, not at the etched fronts of the markers he passed, but at the backs of the opposite row. Nothing, nothing, nothing … then another faint scratch. He stopped. This was not the O and P he had seen before — it was an arrow-like icon. He didn’t know what it meant, but, like the other, it seemed to have been deliberately carved. The name on the stone was Amelia Quinn. A female. One of the poor girls who had been forced into a brothel and had died there of disease or despair? It seemed likely.

  He found two more like it by the time he reached Abraham Jenkins’s grave, and took careful note of the names.

  He stooped to examine the back of Jenkins’s stone. Here he found a faint squiggled line, a crude representation of a snake or a worm slithering across the ground. It meant nothing to him, but he would wager that it correlated somehow with the list that Lavinia had copied.

  Beyond Jenkins, another molly, an additional whore, and two more snakes. Did the symbol stand for vagrant, perhaps? And then the dates on the stones began to read 1849. He stopped walking and counted up the marks he had found. There were eight in all; eight graves with substantial amounts of money hidden in the coffins. His years of memorizing lists of medicines, of learning the names of organs and bones, and the signs and symptoms of disease stood him in good stead now. He fixed the names and locations of each grave in his mind and repeated the list several times over until he was sure that he could retrieve them at a future date.

  But then he wondered if he should retrieve them at all. If he delivered them up to Lavinia, would she really leave Perry alone? Would she and Cherub dig up the money and leave the country, never to be heard of again? Or would she merely present him with another demand, another extortion, another threat? Without doubt, the safest course of action would be to keep the secret to himself. If Hands ever discovered what Lavinia was up to, the trail would lead straight to Yorkville and Thaddeus. Luke would save Perry if he could, but not if it put his father in danger. He would have to do some careful thinking before he did anything at all.

  He went back to the lodge where Sally had joined Thaddeus at the table.

  “What do you think?” Thaddeus asked.

  “I think the best place to wait is by the chapel.”

  “Agreed. You can go first.”

  Luke could see that his father had settled comfortably with the teapot. In fact, Thaddeus seemed supremely comfortable with his new pastime of drinking tea in the Spicer kitchen whenever he could. Luke was sorry that he had been so little company for Thaddeus since they’d come to Yorkville. There had been so many difficulties, so many preoccupations. But these were being cleared away, one by one, and Luke resolved that from then on he would make more time for his father. Time was something he would now have with the epidemic over. And with no Perry to distract him.

  Sally went to bed at ten. “If anything happens, give a shout,” she said. “Morgan will be disappointed if he misses any excitement.”

  “I’ll try, but I can’t promise. A shout would warn intruders, as well,” Thaddeus pointed out.

  “Yes, I suppose it would, wouldn’t it?” She sighed. “Poor Morgan, he’s been so overwrought by this whole thing. You’d think someone was trying to walk off with one of the twins, the way he’s been carrying on.”

  “We’ll do our best to alert him if anything happens,” Luke promised.

  Shortly after eleven o’clock, Thaddeus dragged his chair over to the window. “I’ll watch from here,” he said. “You can go outside.”

  The last thing Luke felt like doing was sitting in the damp grass, but he supposed that having suggested the idea of posting a guard in the graveyard, the least he could do was to play out the charade. He grabbed the old fustian overcoat he had brought with him and walked out to the chapel, hunkering down in the lee of it as best he could. Lavinia said that Hands would be along for his money sooner rather than later, but Luke doubted that anything would happen on the one evening he had decided to lie in wait. He pulled his hat down over his head as far as he could and pushed the collar of his coat up to protect the back of his neck against the damp chill of the August night.

  While he waited, his mind wandered around and through the events of the past few days. They had been momentous, on any number of counts. He no longer had to fear that some strange intelligence would reach Dr. Christie’s ears and endanger not only his employment, but his future prospects. He had solved Morgan Spicer’s puzzle, and Lavinia Van Hansel’s as well. Quite by accident, of course, and he could scarcely tell anyone about it or claim the victory, but it was an accomplishment nonetheless. On the other hand, he had once again embroiled himself and his father in the affairs of one of Toronto’s most dangerous men and managed to destroy a friendship that had barely begun. The life of a village doctor was proving to be anything but uneventful.

  As he waited, Luke felt himself drifting into a half-conscious doze, his thoughts darting here and there until, unexpectedly, they settled on the causes of typhoid fever. He knew the outbreak in Yorkville had to be related to the summer’s drought, and although current medical convention pointed a finger at Toronto’s sewer, the facts as Luke knew them didn’t quite fit this theory. The Spicers used city water regularly, yet none of them had fallen ill. The Christie household did as well; in fact, most of the citizens of Yorkville were dependent on Toronto water. Not so in the villages farther north. Most people there had wells. Not all of them were inexhaustible like the one in Daniel Cummer’s willow grove, and Thaddeus said that he had seen people taking water from the millponds. But there had been far fewer cases of typhoid in the north.

  What were the other sources of water in Yorkville? There were any number of streams and creeks that meandered across the escarpment, Luke knew, but they had dried away to nothing in the drought. When they were running they spilled into the ravines below and from there to the waters of the Don River — except where they were held up by the dam that created the pond by the brewery. The pond that Andrew Holden had grubbed through, looking for specimens to sell to Christie.

  Luke’s first patient had been Andrew Holden’s son.

  We all supply him, Andrew had said. I sold him a big bullfrog in the spring. Had Andrew been infected with typhoid at the pond and somehow carried it to his son? But then why hadn’t Andrew himself fallen ill? Had Caleb Johnson gone hunting there, too? Caleb had been his mother’s only source of income. It stood to reason that he would try to bring in a few extra coins by catering to the local doctor’s eccentric hobby.

  The miasmic fumes from every privy and commode and fouled creek, and even from the decomposing bodies of the Burying Ground itself, must somehow be carried down through the layers of rock to concentrate in the pond below. Was it possible to be infected just by dabbling in polluted water? Luke’s medical training told him that this was nonsense. Infection was carried through the air, not the water. Still, he thought, Christie should tell his hunters to stay away from the pond, just in case. Tell them to look for something besides toads and salamanders.

  And then his mind finally grew weary of problems and he slept.

  He had no idea how much time passed, except that when he came fully to again, the moon was shining through a thin veil of clouds. He looked around at the bizarre shadows cast by the swaying branches and the marble gravestones. These were almost perfect conditions for a covert midnight raid.

  And then, as if he had conjured it, he saw a light bobbing by the cemetery’s northern boundary fence.

  He rolled over onto his knees and glanced at the window of the lodge. There was no way to tell if Thaddeus was watching, and no way to creep to the back door without running the risk of alerting the intruders. Luke would wait to make a move, he decided, until they got a little closer. Then he could only hope that his father hadn’t simply fallen asleep in his chair.

  The light disappeared and for a moment he thought he’d been mistaken, that it was simply someone walking along the side of
the building adjacent to the Burying Ground. Then, as the moon broke fully free from a cloud, he could just make out two figures creeping into the graveyard. They had needed the lantern, he realized, to provide light to climb the fence.

  He watched as the two worked their way across the vacant section of ground, and then they veered suddenly and he lost sight of them. Moving as carefully as he could so as not to make any noise that might signal his presence, he rose to his feet and stepped to the other side of the chapel. He had trouble locating the figures again in the darkness until he caught a glint of light from the shuttered lantern. They were stopped at a grave not far from Isaiah Marshall’s, in a row where Luke had found three stones with marks scratched on the back. He listened for the sound of shovel striking earth, but the wind had risen and the rustle of leaves masked any noise the men made. It would be easy digging tonight. The ground was soft and sodden from the recent rain.

  He glanced back at the lodge in time to see the door open slightly. Thaddeus was awake after all, and judging from his caution, he had seen the lantern, as well, but his view of the trespassers’ current position would be blocked by the chapel. Luke stepped back until he was sure he was out of sight, then waved his arm at Thaddeus. He was unsure what to do. If they rushed at the men now, they were likely to be outrun, and the opportunity to apprehend them would be lost. He debated creeping over to the lodge to consult with his father, but then he would run the risk of being seen. He glanced at the lodge again. Thaddeus was motioning him to move to the rear of the chapel. Luke sidled along the stone wall until he reached the corner of the rear wall. From this position he would be able to more effectively cut off the intruders, should they bolt the same way they had come. Luke wasn’t sure what his father had in mind, but he crouched, tensed and alert. He would be ready for whatever it was.

  Now he could hear the faint scritch scritch of a shovel, then a muttered oath, followed by the hissed admonition, “Shut your trap, Cuddy.”

  After long minutes of watching, Luke had to step back from the corner and stretch his limbs, cramped already from his inadvertent doze and made worse by his hunched position by the wall. Then he peeked around the corner again as he heard the dull thud of the shovel striking wood. He glanced at the lodge door, but could discern no signal from Thaddeus. Surely his father would make a move soon. The grave robbers were well and truly caught in the act now.