The Burying Ground. Janet Kellough
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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.”
“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