Harvest of Secrets by Ellen Crosby

Author:Ellen Crosby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Thirteen

The enormous gilt-edged Bible with its weathered brown leather cover, gilded tool work, faded gold cross, and the barely decipherable embossed names of Thomas and Mary Montgomery probably weighed at least six or seven pounds. Two worn grosgrain ribbons, white and black, marked pages in the Old and New Testaments, placed there by whomever had last been reading it. I found them in Psalms, on the page containing the twenty-third psalm, and in the Gospel of John at the story of the wedding at Cana, Jesus’ first miracle. A third burgundy ribbon was placed at the beginning of the section called Family Record. I turned to the last page and ran my finger over my mother’s elegant handwriting with which she had recorded her marriage to Leland and the birth dates of Eli, Mia, and me. Leland had written in the date of her death. I had filled in my father’s death date. Eli’s first marriage wasn’t listed, nor was Hope’s birth. Eventually there would be my marriage to Quinn and Eli’s to Sasha.

We had some catching up to do.

I found the page listing the births and deaths in the mid-1800s and skimmed them. The only names beginning with the letter C belonged to women, but Yasmin had been very clear that she’d found a man’s cufflink. I started over, checking entries from the late 1700s until the beginning of the twentieth century. Nothing. No man whose first name began with C. In a way, that was probably good news and perhaps CM wasn’t related to me.

Maybe it was the victim in the grave who was a relative, after all. Susanna Montgomery, the youngest child of Hugh, who had ridden with Mosby’s Rangers, had only a birthdate listed next to her name: October 5, 1843. The skeleton had been in her late teens or early twenties when she died, according to Win Turnbull. If it were Susanna, it would fit with Yasmin’s assessment of the grave dating from the 1850s or 1860s. There was also the fact that there was no marriage date or date of death—not even a question mark as if acknowledging that no one knew when she died. Had her death been covered up from her own family? By her own family?

Years ago Leland had hired an archivist from the Thomas Balch Library, the history and genealogy library in Leesburg, to assist him with cataloguing our family documents and putting them in chronological order. The archival boxes that had survived the fire a few years ago were stored in a barrister’s bookcase next to my father’s antique partners desk.

I slid open one of the glass-and-wood-fretted pocket doors, and checked the labels on the boxes. I found nothing in the boxes from the 1850s, but when I got to the 1860s I got lucky, especially because several years were missing, having been destroyed in the fire. Tucked among the newspaper clippings about Mosby’s Rangers and the success of their raids thwarting the Yankees between 1863 and 1865 was a letter from Abigail Montgomery, Hugh’s wife and Susanna’s mother, dated August 8, 1862.

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