The Splendour Falls (43 page)

With a shaking hand that echoed my rattled emotions, I turned off the flame on the stove, and the whistle faded out. Placing my hands on the counter, I let out a trembling breath and the part of my tension caused by the scream of the kettle. My back to the adults at the table, I let their resumed conversation cover my whispered question.

‘Kid stuff. Like magic?'

I couldn't believe I'd said that aloud. If he laughed or called me out for being nuts, I didn't know what I would do. I didn't look at him, but his stillness was its own answer in a way. Then he reached across me and filled my cup as he spoke in my ear. ‘Stay out of it, Sylvie. I don't want anything to happen to you.'

His breath stirred my hair, and I shivered as he moved away. Dimly I heard him saying goodnight and excusing himself. I may have said something automatically, keeping up the act of normalcy until I could get to my room and finally let down my guard.

I believed he didn't want me to be hurt, but there were a lot more people than me involved. I'd been assuming the council had been doing something bad, and Rhys knew about it. He and Shawn were obviously
in opposition somehow, and I'd figured that meant one was ‘bad' and one was ‘good'. But they could be good and less good. Or bad and less bad.

From the beginning, my connection to Rhys had been eerie and inexplicable – the familiarity, and dizzying attraction, and heightened swing of my emotions around him. I'd suspected Shawn's charm of hiding his motives, but what about Rhys?

Maybe I really couldn't trust anyone.

‘Sylvie, honey, are you going to stare at that tea until it's cold?' asked my cousin.

I was too numb with fatigue and confusion to be irritated at her for scolding me like a stern governess. ‘No, ma'am.'

‘Why don't you go to bed if you're so tired?'

That was a great idea. Saying goodnight, I picked up my mug and called for Gigi. She bounced off the professor's lap; he and Clara said goodnight, sounding sympathetic for what I suppose must have looked like complicated romantic problems. I followed Gigi's plumed tail up the stairs, where she checked the halls for me, the advance guard against ghosts.

There was no chill on the landing, and I thanked heaven for small favours, then went into my room and closed the door against the world.

W
hen Gigi woke me in the morning, my first thought wasn't about magic, or about Rhys or Shawn, or how much my romantic troubles were tied up in the mysteries of Bluestone Hill, or what that had to do with the ghosts, if anything. It was about my garden.

Sunday had been the first day I'd spent no time at all there. I'd become used to the invigoration of digging in the dirt, re-creating the generations-old pattern. Not to mention the almost meditative calm it gave me. If I could figure things out at all it would be in the garden.

I dressed hurriedly, anxious to get downstairs and to work – almost as anxious as Gigi, who was impatient for her morning pee, especially since we'd gone to bed so early. I grabbed my copied drawings and notes – satisfyingly grubby by now – and cast a quick, guilty look at the desk, where I'd set Reverend Holzphaffel's journal on top of the other books I'd accumulated. Hannah's journal was still hidden in the drawer. I promised Hannah that a few hours of work in the garden would make me much better able to concentrate on her mystery, and headed downstairs.

However, I hadn't counted on the rain.

The drizzle started as soon as Gigi had finished her business. The light coat of moisture didn't seem to bother her, so we went to the knot garden, where she flopped at the base of the rock and rolled in the wet herbs.

The bluestone lived up to its name when it was wet, turning a dark slate colour. Did it live up to the rest of its hype? Electromagnetic potential, mystical energy, lines of spiritual force making a web on the earth – what did those things have to do with ghosts and magic?

Think, Sylvie.
With the exception of the incident in Central Park, I only saw and sensed things here at the Hill and in Old Cahawba, and they were so close I might as well think of them together. So there was something about this place.

But there was something about me, too. That was why Shawn was so excited by my arrival, and why Rhys was so confused when I knew nothing about the Hill. He must have expected that I'd arrive and meddle
with – whatever he was doing. I just wished I knew what it was I was supposed to be able to do.

Everything about Bluestone Hill went back generations. Maybe to figure out my story, I first needed to figure out Hannah's.

‘Sylvie Davis!' I jumped when Paula yelled at me from the porch. The startled slam of my pulse almost drowned out her annoyingly predictable admonition. ‘Don't you even think about gardening in the rain. Do you want to catch your death?'

Definitely not. And I didn't want her irritated with me, either. So I called back, ‘I'm coming, Cousin Paula,' in an obedient voice.

It looked like I'd be spending the morning in my room with Hannah after all.

In a way, reading Hannah's journal was as absorbing as working in the garden. When Gigi whined and scratched at the door, I had to blink myself back to the present, disoriented by the modern things in the room.

I'd started reading the entries where I'd left off, about a quarter of the way in, and just a few months before the end of the war. Hannah didn't write every day, and the whole journal covered the last six years of her life. The older she got, the more interesting her entries, though they remained frustratingly vague about the things I wanted to know most.

Gigi became insistent. The rain had stopped, and I
knew that walking the dog would force me to stretch my legs and work the kinks out of my back.

My knotted muscles were going to require more exercise than a stroll to the garden. I put on my sneakers and grabbed Gigi's leash, a plan already half formed. Figuring Paula might have something to say about my heading out into the woods, even in the daytime, I avoided her on the way out. Following the forest's edge made a longer walk to Old Cahawba, but it meant I didn't have to pay such close attention to my feet. After some of the things I'd read, I had a lot to think about.

Hannah didn't have one suitor, she had two. She referred to them rather unhelpfully as E___ M___ and J___ M___. Reading between the lines, I'd figured out that EM was probably Ethan Maddox, referred to in Reverend Holzphaffel's journal. Hannah's own entries told me that JM was his brother. I was almost to the end of her story, and I still didn't know which of them was The One. Late in the tale, about nine months before her last entry, she merely wrote of seeing ‘him' today, or of meeting ‘him' on the street.

However, E and J had their own story. They fought side by side in the war, but now – Hannah's now, which, even as I walked through the woods, following the plume of Gigi's tail, seemed slightly more real than my own time – the brothers hated each other. It didn't seem to be merely romantic competition, either. Hannah wrote how much it troubled her that whole families of men and boys were lost (her brothers, for
instance) to the battlefield, and E and J couldn't stop their fighting.

Gigi and I reached a dirt road with an open gate – the entrance to Old Cahawba. The rain hadn't been hard enough to turn the road to mud, but it made the red earth sticky, turning Gigi's white feet to a rusty tan that matched the rest of her.

The road led to the fenced ‘new' cemetery. Dr Young had explained there was an ‘old' graveyard on the other side of the ghost town, where, even in death, the residents were segregated. I glimpsed Dr Young with a couple of tourists, giving them his spiel. He waved when he saw me, but I didn't interrupt. I knew what I was looking for.

When he was free, he joined me at the Maddox plot. I'd found Ethan Maddox. He died an old guy in 1895. But I saw no J. Maddox born near the same time. Which didn't necessarily mean that J had been the one to run off on Hannah. He could have left, or Ethan could have returned, after the fact.

‘Hey, little lady,' said Dr Young, then bent to pet Gigi, so I wasn't sure which of us he meant. ‘You're not limping today, I see.'

I realized that was true, despite the long walk. Of course, I had taken the more level path, which was much easier on my leg. And as I pointed out to him, ‘It's worst when I'm tired or the weather is changing.'

He chuckled. ‘Well, you must be in a different climate than me. There's a front blowing in a storm up north of us, and all my joints are aching today.' He gave Gigi a last pat, then stood stiffly, proving
his point. ‘But enough of that. Here for the rest of the tour?'

On a different day, I would have indulged him, and myself, with the full history lesson, but I was on a mission. ‘Actually, I have a question for you. Though I wouldn't mind seeing more of the site while you answer.'

‘Excellent. I haven't been to check on the dig today. We can ride over together if you like.'

‘Great.' We started towards the cemetery gate. Though it was hard to forget the eerier aspects of our problems, the exercise of deciphering the puzzle of Hannah's story had steadied my mind, and I was eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge.

‘So my question is this: What's a scalawag?' The Colonel had called J that, which hurt Hannah greatly. ‘I gather it's not a nice thing.'

‘Oh, no. A scalawag was worse than a carpet bagger.' At my blank look he explained, ‘A carpet bagger – Reconstructionist is the nice term – was an opportunistic Northerner who came down after the Civil War had yanked the foundations out from under folks here. Not only did the war tear up the land and decimate families, the entire economy had been destroyed.'

‘By emancipation of the slaves,' I said pointedly, in case he was one of
those
Southerners.

He chuckled. ‘Don't take that tone. I'm just telling you the facts. It was a rough time.'

I knew this from reading Hannah's journal. Her own situation hadn't been helped by her father coming
home from the war a bitter, broken man. Not that he'd been a sweetheart before.

‘So,' I prompted as we reached the truck and Dr Young opened the door for me, ‘carpetbaggers bought up land for pennies and made a fortune on the South's misery.'

‘Right.' He closed my door, walked round and got behind the wheel, then continued as if he hadn't paused. ‘A scalawag was a Southerner who helped the carpetbaggers.'

I processed this in light of what Hannah had written, factoring in the complex emotions of the loser of a war forced to rely on the winner to rebuild the states they'd toasted in the first place. ‘So, if a Confederate veteran was a scalawag, then a loyal Southern gentleman, like Colonel Davis, for example, might not like him courting his daughter.'

Dr Young laughed in disbelief. ‘He'd have to have
cojones
of solid brass just to try.' He glanced at me as he backed up the truck and pulled onto the road. ‘Where did you get all this?'

‘Just some family papers.'

I knew he'd be fascinated by the diary, but I didn't want to share even the existence of it yet. I felt like I'd been reading Hannah's private thoughts over her shoulder, and it would be a betrayal of her to gossip about it. Our problems were different, though with some obvious parallels: liking two guys, not sure who was in the right. She was strongly drawn to J, the scalawag, but conflicted about his motivations. She liked E well enough, but he was entrenched in town
politics – including a council that met behind closed doors at the Hill – and she was unnerved by the expectations, especially from the Colonel, that she marry him.

Dr Young turned on Capital, interrupting my thoughts. I shifted uneasily on the bench seat as we got closer to the site of the old prison. Gigi, however, was happy standing on my knees, front paws on the dash. ‘Tell me about this archaeological dig,' I said, to distract myself from the anticipation of weirdness.

‘Oh, there's a group of students from U of A who are doing an internship. Excavating the foundations of the church by the river.'

‘I thought Saint Mary's over towards the town was the church by the river.'

‘Well, it's
a
church by
a
river. Built and paid for by uppity country families who didn't want to come into town to go to services.' He took his eyes off the road long enough to wink at me as he turned east, away from the prison site.

I relaxed considerably at the change in direction, and saw a large excavation – it looked like a basement – where at one end two guys and a girl were working with trowels and screens to dig and shift through the dirt. ‘I guess Rhys isn't here today,' said Dr Young.

He'd been absent from the kitchen when I'd come in from the rain, and I hadn't seen him upstairs. I hadn't checked to see if the rental car was there, either.