Page 10 of The Orphan of Cemetery Hill
“Er, I believe the freshly dead sell at a premium to surgeons and medical students. For dissection, that is.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Caleb marveled at this. His father had been a miser and a hard man, but he certainly hadn’t deserved such a fate. Caleb wouldn’t be able to tell his mother about the desecration, of course; it would shatter the poor dear’s nerves. Rose likewise should be kept in the dark, lest she become upset. “I thank you for bringing this to my attention,” Caleb said, turning toward the back of the cemetery. “I’ll bid you good day and take a walk to the grave site if it’s all the same.”
Mr. Cooke looked as if he would have thrown himself in Caleb’s path to stop him if he could have. “I... You want to go to the grave? There’s nothing to see there except a pried-open door and a splintered coffin,” he said. “It might be most distressing for you.”
But Caleb was already making his way to the back of the cemetery, scanning for a splash of bright red hair.
The crypt yawned at him balefully as he approached, debris and evidence of forced entry scattered about the ground. But it was the person he found there that caught his interest. “Hullo there.”
Miss Cooke was crouched by the edge of the crypt with broom in one hand and pan in the other, sweeping up splintered bits of wood. She was wearing the same brown wool dress as usual, and without her bonnet her loose red hair shone brilliantly in the sunlight. At the sound of his voice she sprang up, sending wood and dust falling from her pan. “Caleb,” she said. “I mean, Mr. Bishop. What are you doing here?”
Caleb was more than a little pleased at the way she breathed his name as if it were the most precious word to ever cross her lips, and the strange news of his father’s body was momentarily forgotten. “What, is a man not allowed to pay his respects?”
She colored prettily at this, and he noticed that she had a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “No, of course not, it’s only—”
He stopped her with an airy wave of his hand. “Don’t fret, I was only teasing.” She was easy to tease, and though there was a guardedness about her, there was also a sensitivity, and he realized he would have to be careful with this rare cemetery bird, lest she take flight and leave him there. Because even though there was no accounting for it, he realized that he very much wanted her to stay.
They stood in silence, staring into the violated tomb, the only sound the clip of horses on the cobblestone street and a breeze lifting from the harbor and filtering through the trees.
When she spoke her voice was small, hesitant. “I—I am very sorry about what happened to your father’s body. He...” She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but trailed off.
Caleb knew he ought to have been angrier about the robbery, but it was mostly just annoyance that it was one more unpleasant task on his endless list of obligations since his father died. The realization made him only loathe himself the more that he was such a vain creature, just as his father had always accused him of being. “I just hope the villains are brought to justice without too much fuss,” he finally said.
“I doubt the police will be of much help. They could hardly be bothered when it happened before.”
“You mean to say that this isn’t the first time?”
She nodded. “The night we met, actually. I wonder that you didn’t cross paths with them.”
He gave a low whistle. “Is that so?” Then an unexpected surge of anger ran through him. “I say, they didn’t bother you, did they?”
“No, they didn’t know I was there.”
A cemetery was no place for a little girl, even if her father was the caretaker. He wanted to ask her about how she had come to find herself there in the dead of night, but something told him he wouldn’t get an answer.
“Do you think they targeted him in particular? He wasn’t exactly well liked.”
Miss Cooke shook her head. “I doubt they knew or cared who he was. They probably just wanted someone recently buried.”
Caleb mused on this. “Do you know, my old man thought that a witch put a curse on him when he was a boy? Nothing was ever his fault. No matter that he was a bitter old drunk—if something went wrong, someone else always was to blame.” The story of the witch always came out when he was deep in his cups, an angry, incohesive rant that explained everything from Mr. Bishop’s lame leg to the bad luck that had plagued him throughout his sixty years. “It’s all nonsense, of course,” he continued. “Well, I hope wherever he is, he’s in better spirits.”
Miss Cooke hadn’t said anything in a while. He looked over at her and found that she was worrying at her lip, staring at the crypt. “Miss Cooke? Are you all right?”
If she heard him, she gave no indication. “Mr. Bishop, there’s something I need to tell you. I...”
He waited for her to finish, but she didn’t seem inclined to go on. “Yes?”
“I... That is...” Pausing, she darted a furtive glance at him, then took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. “I spoke with your father.”
“You were acquainted with my father?” Caleb couldn’t help his incredulous tone. This young woman was really quite extraordinary. She dressed as if she were the poorest church mouse, never seemed to leave the cemetery, and yet she had somehow crossed paths with his old man, who had always been notoriously proud when it came to mixing with the lower classes.
She bit her lip and twisted her hands together. “Well, not exactly... That is...”
Caleb groaned, leaning back against a tree. “Oh, don’t tell me. You weren’t one of his...” At her wide-eyed expression, Caleb cleared his throat and straightened. “Of course you weren’t. I shouldn’t have even suggested such a thing. I apologize.”
Something in her seemed to shift, and her face shuttered. “It doesn’t matter how or when I spoke to him,” she said with a defensive bite in her voice. “He said that the ledgers are in a lockbox, behind a false panel in the bottom drawer of his desk. He knows that you aren’t good at balancing the numbers, but hopes that with time will come diligence.” With this, she crouched back down and resumed her cleaning.
This caught his attention. Drawing closer, he bent and took her by the arm. “How did you know about the lockbox?” he asked, raising her up. After he had gone home the other day, he had turned his father’s study upside down, and sure enough, the ledgers had been in the bottom drawer of the desk. As for balancing them, he couldn’t imagine a scenario in which his father had even a sliver of faith in him.
