Writ on Water (9 page)

“Fine with me,” Chloe answered. The boys would be there at nine to handle the hard work. They would just do a little leisurely supervising until it was time for the noon break. Surely by then MacGregor would be ready for a nap.

“Shall we go?” MacGregor stood.

Chloe cast a longing eye at the basket of scones and the numerous chafing dishes from which
wafted alluring smells. She had enjoyed the same odors many times before, but in Riverview they were especially evocative. In a private home, this mix was the smell of good taste and old money liberally applied to already luxurious possessions. She was willing to bet the bagels were fresh and the eggs came from hens raised in palatial coops and fed baby greens and fresh corn.

“But it's only eight,” she objected. “The boys won't be here until—”

“We'll do the family graveyard first. It's more interesting anyway,” he said impatiently. “Grab a bun and come along. The weather is just going to get hotter.”

He had a point. Chloe stopped sniffing, grabbed a scone, and followed her host down the hall that led to the back of the house. They were both booted in hiking shoes, and it sounded like a regiment of soldiers clomping through the confined space of the uncarpeted hallway.

They exited through a Victorian parlor draped in a plethora of red velvet swags that somehow managed to stay on the right side of tastefulness, and out onto a small stoop that had been painted white and stenciled with some sort of flowering vine pattern. Chloe would have enjoyed a lengthy ogle of both parlor and porch, but the roused MacGregor was in a hurry.

Several paths crisscrossed under the Herculean oaks at the rear of the house, but MacGregor ignored them in favor of directness as he set a
double-time pace across the groundcover and marched toward the antler hedge that encircled the manse. Chloe hesitated a moment as she stared at the half-familiar sight, then shrugged off the sensation of déjà vu and started after her host.

They were joined on the expedition by a large black and white cat who, though walking in the master's shadow, wisely kept well away from MacGregor's crashing footsteps.

“This is Roger,” MacGregor said by way of introduction. “Jolly Roger.”

The intelligent feline looked back politely. Seeing the triangular patch of black over his left eye and the rolling gait that suggested a sailor pacing over the deck of ship during high seas, Chloe didn't bother to ask how he'd gotten the name.

“Hi, kitty,” she said around a mouthful of pastry. The cat blinked once at her bad manners and then ignored her. It seemed that even Riverview's pet was superior to her, and unlike his owner, not inclined to be indulgent.

It soon became apparent that there actually was a small break in the antler fortification as MacGregor dodged right and was suddenly swallowed up by the hedge. Roger immediately followed him into the shrubbery and likewise disappeared.

Chloe hurried after, grateful that she wasn't burdened with her camera equipment. Whenever possible, she liked to reconnoiter before bringing her babies out into the hostile world, and this world was certainly hostile to humans, however
fecund the pretty flora around them. This hedge was more than a polite request for privacy. It was prettier than barbed wire and broken glass, but many times more fearsome. A careless fall could leave someone maimed for life or even gored to death.

The strange, claustrophobic path through the hedgerow was narrow and went on for some distance. It eventually exited into a shady grove where the oak ceiling grew thick enough to shut out the worst of the sun. It was eerily still and quiet until MacGregor spoke. His cheerful voice shattered the air of peaceful melancholia, and seemed to stir up the dust and leaf mold missed by their hiking boots.

“Slave cemetery is that way . . .” He jerked a thumb to the right. Chloe couldn't see anything beyond a six-foot-tall pile of wild brambleberries whose upper reaches were smothered in cobwebs furred with dust and studded with catkins from the lone maple growing overhead. “The family is over this way.” MacGregor headed in the opposite direction, fallen oak leaves crunching underfoot as he moved.

“Well, what do you think?” he continued. “Nice and quiet, isn't it? You don't get this kind of peace in Metairie.
Tourists?
What locusts! And frankly, I've always thought New Orleans overrated. Their grave goods aren't
that
nice. And ours are every bit as old.”

Chloe didn't comment on his disparaging reference
to one of New Orleans's famous cemeteries. An old man had to be allowed some partiality for his family's burial ground.

“I think I may have a light problem,” she answered absently, staring up at the leafy canopy. “Is it all as dark as this?”

“What?” MacGregor turned. “Oh, lights for the camera, you mean. It's pretty much the same everywhere out here. I expect you can work it out. Roland said that you were good with this sort of thing and had some fancy new kind of camera. And we can always buy anything you need.”

Actually, what Roland had probably said was that she was good at making do and had the patience of Job when it came to rescuing photos on the computer. She wondered how he would feel about her making unauthorized purchases for this special job. Probably not thrilled. Maybe she could blame it all on MacGregor.

“Of course I'll manage. I'm a professional,” she said loftily. “I have worked in some of the most famous cemeteries in—Oh my!”

MacGregor had tugged aside a curtain of honeysuckle and revealed a bedizened granite portico with a recessed wooden gate. The wood was so old it was nearly black, and it was heavily carved with a traditional funerary pattern of inverted torches, rose garlands and laurel wreaths. Again there came a feeling of déjà vu. Sleeping Beauty's castle would have been guarded by just
such a gate, she thought, and Chloe's heart began to flutter.

MacGregor fished a giant key out of his pocket and stuffed it into the ancient box lock. The antique mechanism opened without the expected grate of rusted iron, and the gates themselves swung back without a shriek. Obviously, the gate's hinges were cared for, in spite of the plant life's overgrown condition. The plants were probably just a clever camouflage, which would suggest to a stranger a high degree of neglect.

Roger pranced on ahead of his master, but MacGregor paused before entering the dark space beyond. He held his arm across the threshold like a bar while he studied Chloe.

“I want you to understand something, Chloe. I don't let folks in here. Don't hold tours for the historical society and such nonsense. I don't have in photographers from the Smithsonian, though I've been asked a time or two. This is a private place for my family, and I want it to stay that way.”

Chloe didn't understand why MacGregor should suddenly be nervous about showing her the cemetery, but she was willing to agree with anything he wanted. She would do whatever it took to get the job done without arousing her boss's ire.

“Sure. I understand.”

MacGregor looked deep into her eyes. For the first time, the engaging twinkle was missing from his hazel gaze. Chloe was abruptly aware of a vein of granite running under his benevolent exterior.
She shouldn't have been surprised by the streak of hardness—all despots had them.

“I'm the keeper now. The guardian. These folks were my family. They were people once who were alive just like you and me. They laughed and loved, made war and babies. Some were heroes, some scoundrels. You ever hear that epitaph by Keats about ‘
Here lies one whose name was writ in water'
? Well, that goes for all these dead folks. All that's left of them now are these monuments and some crumbling old bones. I don't want them to end up being robbed of what little they have left. Flesh is forgotten, consumed. Bones, too, eventually. But these monuments live on.”

“That's why I'm here,” Chloe said gently, though her heart was pounding with some strange alarm. “I'm your insurance policy in case the unthinkable happens.”

MacGregor nodded. “But my best insurance is that no one knows it's here. I want to keep it that way for as long as I can. Rory made me promise to talk to you about this.”

Rory
. Of course he was responsible for this new show of nerves on MacGregor's part. Obviously he didn't trust her.

“You have my word,” she said gravely. “I won't reveal anything I see without your permission.”

MacGregor nodded again and then turned and ducked under the low header that guarded the dark portal of the necropolis.

“Then come meet the family.”

The first monuments on the other side were a row of sepulchers carved in the Greek, Roman and Etruscan style, decorated with urns and life-sized muses in various languishing poses. The poor maidens of the arts wept lichen tears down their anguished faces, and had their stony hands shackled in living ropes of passionflowers. The themes were primarily Greek, but Chloe had seen enough funerary monuments to recognize the work of Italian stonemasons.

“Oh my sainted aunt!” she whispered, staring up into a pitted gray face that was forever frozen in a mask of profound grief.

“Foggini,” MacGregor confirmed with satisfaction. “He did Galileo's sepulcher. There's Picchi and Brancusi. And Granddad.” MacGregor pointed as he spoke.

“Granda—Oh, your
grandfather.”

“Tamlane MacGregor Patrick. He was a little bit eccentric.” They stopped in front of a vaguely neo-gothic marble tomb fronted with pillars and roundels of male and female masks representing the heavens and the earth.

“This looks vaguely familiar.”

“It's by that Frenchie, Rodin.”

“Auguste Rodin?” Chloe's voice was feeble.

“Granddad wanted
The Gates of Hell
, but Grandma wouldn't let him have it. She commissioned him to do this instead.
The Gates of Heaven
, she called it.”

“I think I'm going to faint.”

“I'm glad you know your art. You'll do a better job.” MacGregor's face was smug, and another clear reminder that pashas, while sometimes generous, were not entirely saintly and benevolent. “Come along. I want you to see the Saint-Gaudens. He's just about the only American sculptor we have in here. I like him a lot, even if he isn't Italian.”

Chloe liked him too. His brilliantly rendered marble angels looked happy.

They soon passed into a lower rent district where the lesser family and their pets were put to rest. There were Celtic crosses overgrown with ivy and vervain, surrounded by picket fences made of stone, or ironwork hedges drowning in clematis. Obviously, the boys hadn't been in with the pruning shears for a few months. That would make taking clear photographs of the monuments difficult, and perhaps even dangerous if Rory was right about the snakes, but the cat seemed to enjoy chasing invisible mice through the grasping bushes, and the feral plants lent the place a certain gothic air.

Chloe didn't stray off of the path in her bare legs, but she saw an array of arresting images that fired her imagination. There were the three-quarters eyes that were both the symbol of the Masons but also of the Holy Trinity. There were also lots of doves, suggesting that the inhabitants of those graves had either been Catholic or Jewish, and—sadly—the white lambs that marked the graves of children were abundant. There were a few anchors with broken chains that indicated
some of the Patricks had been sailing men, and one out-of-place Muslim crescent.

“How large is the cemetery?” she asked finally, beginning to tire. A constant state of admiration was exhausting.

“Two acres. One hundred seven human graves and mausoleums. Ninety-three dogs. Eighty-one cats. Four horses—my great-grandfather buried his favorite team here. And one monkey.”

MacGregor walked her slowly past aisles of eighteenth-century hands; praying hands, clasping hands, pointing and blessing hands. There were Saint Michaels and Francises and a bevy of Virgins. The end of the first corridor was marked with a particularly grisly carving of the Sacred Heart leaping out of Jesus's chest, confirming Chloe's impression that the majority of the Patricks had been Catholic.

“ ‘For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,' ” Chloe muttered, quoting Ephesians as she looked at a stone archangel who brandished an upraised sword.

“Is that the way you think of it?” MacGregor asked with a smile. “Then you will like this next part. Follow me and mind the clematis.” He swept aside a thicket of vine with a large hand that would have looked at home carrying a machete.

“Whither thou goest.”

The following section showed art typical to New
England and among the Presbyterians of Scotland: grim reapers with scythes and winged skulls. This section also was marked with the sort of candid epitaphs that spoke plainly of the deceased's faults and brought joy to the taphophiles of the world.

Calum Patrick 1741–1780
He was a terrible man,
Cruel to everyone except his wife,
His sons and his friends

Moira Patrick, beloved wife
1752–1774
Think on what a wife should be
For she was that and more

Andrew Patrick 1721–1770
He suffers no more

Edana Patrick 1740–1771
The angels took her home

Rachael Ryan Patrick 1723–1775
Ever tardy, even to the grave

Roderick Allen and James David Patrick 1725–1747
Hanged for seeking treasure that didn't exist
Here lie the ones responsible for this

Beloved Kelton Patrick 1791–1862
This stone is placed by a mournful wife who will
gladly join him soon

Ridiculously, Chloe felt tears gathering in her eyes. She heard a noise and turned to find MacGregor sniffling dolefully.