Ghosts of Graveyards Past (15 page)

“I can hardly believe that is true. A girl as pretty as you are.”

Glancing up, she found their faces were just inches apart.

He leaned in for a kiss that was chaste and somewhat embarrassed.

The journal had slid from her grasp, thumping against the porch planks.

With a muttered apology, Clive handed it back to her, disappearing inside the house with a final worried look—whether for himself or for what she might think, Mariah would rather have died than ask. It was the first and only time a man behaved so boldly to her, though Mariah had sometimes thought others wished to pay her the same kind of attention.

Arthur Widlow was harder to read. His gaze bore the same admiration as Clive's, but his manner was far less impulsive. Keeping his feelings beneath the surface, he said nothing until a crisis late one day forced them suddenly into the light. “You are angry with me,” he guessed, his breath coming in gasps as he looked up from the bed in his sick chamber. “I should not have worked so long, I know, but there is only my father to bring in the harvest. The rain was not expected, and I returned as quickly as I could—”

“Shh.” She daubed his forehead, alarmed by the panic in his features. The rain had done his illness no favors, a high temperature coming on shortly after. She felt relief that they had sent for her—to her mind, a man who would let his son work in this state of health, necessity or no, seemed unlikely to send for a woman physician's opinion on the cure.

She was patient with him, spooning down medicine that had previously helped. “This struggle will pass shortly,” she said as he fought to get comfortable. “It is not your time.”

“You cannot promise that.” His faint laugh turned to coughing as if to prove it. “Only the Maker knows our final hour,” he said, recovering his voice. “No earthly remedy can trump His Will, however good it may be.”

“I believe there is only nature and human error to account for the time of one's death,” she replied mildly, ringing out the cloth in a basin. Wiping his brow again, she let herself smile a little. “Yours, Mr. Widlow, shall not be on my conscience.”

“If it was my time,” he challenged, forcing a deeper breath, “and I was to be dying right now—what would you say? No false assurances; only the comfort you should wish to hear in your own distress.”

She paused. It was an intimate question for people who met just recently in their lives. Seeing it might take his mind off the pain, she decided to reply, “I think…I would not want them to say anything. I would only want them to take my hand so I could feel their warmth. A touch that was gentle instead of clinging.” As she spoke, she reached for where his lay on the quilt, holding it loosely, to see if he minded.

“What else?” His voice cracked this time with emotion instead of illness. “You would wish something more from a loved one,” he suggested. “An admirer, even.”

“This,” she answered, her free hand reaching to cradle his face. His eyes closed in response. Mariah swept her fingers along his jaw to brush the mouth that was partly open. A tender touch she instantly questioned, pulling her hand away as she said, “I am sorry—”

“Don't be,” he said, gently guiding her hand back to press against his lips.

Skin tingling from the brief connection, Mariah wondered how a real kiss from him might compare to that of her other suitor. His hands still held hers, gently, without the clinging she had decried moments before. Leaning down before she knew what she was doing, she felt her lips steal the kiss that was shorter, but far sweeter than her first one.

After that, it was no use pretending they were only acquaintances.

Mariah continued to nurse him, surprised to see how quickly the vigor returned to his build, his lungs sounding clearer beneath her stethoscope with each daily check. Her triumph was lessened only by the knowledge it would speed his enlistment, a plan he continued to talk of despite the connection between them.

One afternoon, standing in the parlor where first they spoke, he gripped his hat nervously between his hands. “There is to be a recruitment meeting in a nearby county next Saturday,” he confided. “It may be my last chance for a while.”

“Then you must go,” she said, attempting to seem supportive and not disappointed as she spoke again. “You are well enough—”

“That is not why I ask.” He pulled her closer, foreheads touching in a brief show of tenderness while no one else saw. “How can I leave without making you my wife?” he asked, his hand cradling the curls knotted behind her head.

She buried her face in the wool coat, heart racing at the suggestion he offered. “We have known each other so little time. Six weeks or less.”

“And I have loved you most of it,” he said. “I will be strong, though, if you can do the same. This war cannot last long, and we will marry as soon as I return. Until then, in my heart I will be yours as truly as if we were man and wife already.”

Mariah promised the same, though tears choked her reply part way. That night, she recorded the progress of her patient in the daybook that held all her notes, pen sweeping over the page in cool, steady strokes to make the final entry for the farmer's son as if he were an ordinary patient and nothing more.

 

April 3
rd
, 1862: Mr. Widlow, having recovered fully from his infection, is now prepared to don the uniform of a private. If I believed in a loving God, I would beg His forgiveness for restoring a young man's health only to send him to face the horrors of the battlefield. My patient could not be persuaded to do otherwise, his allegiance to his home strong, as no doubt it should be. May he somehow stay safe in this madness we hear of daily.

 

 

 

 

12

 

November 9
th
1862: Have been to the Lesley house, where the evidence of Mischief Night was still painted on the door. What a strange prank for the children to play, though most have taken it with a laugh and a shake of the head. They talk of ghosts and goblins and supernatural gifts with the same ease as they might the weekly sermon, and some believe it almost as much.

 

The doctor saw it before she reached the farmhouse.

Blood red and scrawled in the shape of a half moon, a broken arrow laced through it to resemble a letter ‘V'. Not frightening, but strange and childish, somehow. As if small, careless fingers had painted it there.

Her hand avoided touching it as she rapped on the door. Footsteps pounded on the other side, the door opening to reveal a boy's somber face.

Blain, the couple's only child and sixteen years old—enlistment age, in some people's estimation, answered the door. “Mama's in the kitchen,” he told her. His gaze shifting to the mark on the door with a sense of distaste. “Strange, ain't it, Miss Mariah? Put there by nobody knows who.”

“Very odd,” she agreed. “Why would they do such a thing, Blain?”

A slyness appeared in the boy's face. He turned away, motioning for her to follow, as he said, “For a prank, ‘course. Same as always this time of year. You never heard of it?”

“Of Mischief Night?” she asked. “No, not before I came here.”

Nell's grandmother had spoken of a similar ritual from the Scottish Highlands. The broken buckets left by the Darrow's gate that evening had been a sort of offering to the children in search of something to steal or burn. Harmless fun, so they said.

“Never heard of it?” Blain glanced back at her, wonder in his eyes. “I thought everyone did the same as us.”

Smiling at his disbelief, she followed him through the narrow hall to the kitchen. Here, the farm wife shelled peas into a bowl while her husband read the county newspaper from a rocking chair by the hearth.

Mariah glanced at the headline, heart catching as she read the words ”Skirmishes Rumored Along Northern River” in bold print. She had already heard it spoken of many times, the details vague enough to leave equal room for both hope and worry.

“You have seen it then,” the farm wife said, rising from her chair as they entered the room. “That ugly-looking mark on the door. More than a week now, and still he refuses to sand it off.” This was said with an exasperated look to the fireplace.

Mr. Lesley continued to read, a slight narrowing of the eyes the only indication he heard his wife's complaint .

“I have never seen such a drawing before,” Mariah admitted, setting her bag on the table. “What does it mean?”

“Never seen it anywhere but on graves,” the woman confided. “Not natural to find it elsewhere—a bad sign. Work of youngins, I suppose, but ‘tis work of the devil all the same.” With a sigh, she took her seat at the table again. The collar to her dress had been loosened, revealing skin that was badly inflamed below the neckline. “All across here, it goes,” she said, running a hand over the upper part of the gown's bodice. “Itches something fierce.”

“How long has it been this way?” Mariah asked.

“Since yesterday,” the woman replied. “Tried buttermilk and it only grows worse.”

It was likely from contact with a plant. The foliage that grew by the spring was rife with plants of a poisonous or prickly nature. One might have become tangled with the garment during washing, or else transferred through the woman's touch.

“I know of a tried and true method,” Mariah began, knowing the Lesleys preferred medicine of a traditional nature. “I will need your hearth to prepare it.”

Wordlessly, Mr. Lesley scooted his chair towards the wall, freeing a space for her to work by the fireplace. No doubt, he disapproved of her being summoned in the first place. But his wife was not one to suffer in silence as Mariah knew from the morning's conversation.

The boy was seated on a wooden stool by the door, watching her combine the lard and sulfur. His gaze searched her features with a quiet admiration that went unnoticed by his mother as she continued to rant about the children's mischief.

“I can hardly understand why they should go and spoil
our
door, not after we left a whole gate for the bonfire. What should make them draw such an evil thing?”

“Oh, quit your worrying, woman,” came the response of her husband. “It's an old symbol with more than just the grave to give it meaning. Stands for the changes in the weather, I've heard.”

“Means death,” the woman insisted, “and I'll not be having it on my door. Be it by children or the devil that it came there.”

Folding his paper, the man stood with the finality of one preparing to depart. “Better to have a bit of paint on the door then to find the wheels removed from the wagon. Or wake to find the cattle let out of your pasture as Martin Cray done found.” Smacking the newspaper lightly against his son's head, he ordered, “Help me mend that hole in the fence, ‘fore our livestock's out roaming the town.”

Blain straggled sullenly after his father.

The doctor felt sorry for him, wondering if his parents always carried on this way. The Darrow household, for all its flaws, was gentler in its words of unhappiness than those she heard exchanged here.

When the visit drew to a close, the patient handed her a basket of eggs in payment. Looping it over her arm, Mariah advised, “Send for me again if there is no improvement within the week.” As she left, her gaze wandered to the symbol on the door with its lurid shade of red.

Mariah saw it again when she called at the Tate's cabin further down the spring. Heavy with child, the lady of the house could barely rise to answer the door, her only companion a girl of five. Her son, Billy, was already in school.

“The pain is so bad at times,” she explained, “and my fingers swell so, I cannot even write to my husband in the camp. Billy takes it down for me, but one can hardly say all they wish through another's hand.”

Mariah felt herself pale with the words. She picked up a corn shuck doll the girl had dropped nearby. “Does your husband write of the camp's movements? One hears such talk of battle. It seems everyone's chief worry these days.”

The lady shook her head. “Word has not come in almost two months' time, nor pay, goodness knows.”

This was a hint that no fee would be met for today's visit.

The doctor collected her bag, returning the doll to its owner's small hands. The little girl's dress seemed as rumpled as the corn shuck, her pale eyes gazing at Mariah before she turned to go.

 



 

November 10
th
, 1862: One thirty, a new patient, a female of nineteen years, arrived lately from Jefferson County to wed Mr. Lucas Kendrick. Patient complains of a cough and abdominal pains. I have started Mrs. Kendrick on castor oil and quinine, with a promise to call again tomorrow…

 

Geneva Kendrick's girlish figure and hazel eyes reminded the doctor of her own mother. Or rather, what she remembered her mother looking like from when she was a child of five years, sitting on her lap in the foyer outside her father's study.

She knew the delicate features were similar, the brown hair wound into a coiffure. If the too-pale complexion was also familiar, she didn't linger on the thought.

“I have been ill before,” Geneva told her, hands clasped in her lap. “At finishing school last February. A fever dimmed my eyesight for more than a week.”

“But you fully recovered it?” Mariah asked, looking closely at the girl's dark orbs, seeing only anxiety to mar their depths.

“Oh, yes. As clear as before, or even better, since I learned to appreciate it more.”

They were sitting in the parlor to Lucas Kendrick's house, a room furnished with articles belonging to the man's former wife. Common knowledge said the first Mrs. Kendrick died several winters back from an unsuccessful childbirth. In her absence, the curtains and rugs, tables, chairs and other accessories had grown pitifully old-fashioned and faded.