Chapter Three

MARCH 1944

Celia didn’t want to wait to explore the attic but knew she had no choice, at least not for the moment. Olney’d promised to return within the hour, to get the worst of the tree out before dark.

True to his word, Olney brought two men from Saints Delight Church, Deacon Barlow and his oldest son, Jay, all three carrying axes. Chester made a fourth. Together they chopped and hefted and pushed until the top of the tree no longer rested on the roof or in the attic. Celia pulled out long, skinny pine branches, handing them up to Jay, who’d climbed to the roof to throw them out.

Pulling out those limbs, working with Jay, reminded Celia of Marshall, Olney’s nephew, who’d helped to restore Garden’s Gate a few years before. But Marshall couldn’t stay. A colored teenager with ambitions to better himself, maybe even study to be a doctor, found no place in No Creek at the time. The Klan saw to that.

Celia didn’t miss Marshall for the hard work he could do. She missed his friendship. But friendships between young colored men and white girls were forbidden in No Creek —a thing Marshall had nearly lost his life learning. Now Marshall, like so many young men Celia knew who’d gone to war, was stationed far away. She only hoped that one day he’d return, that he’d be able to return.

They secured the tree just as the sun fell behind the mountain.

“Let’s get these tarps tacked in place for the night, keep out what we can till I get some lumber ordered for these rafters, see what we can do about patchin’ that roof.” Olney scratched his head. “Miz Lill —Miz Willard —might want to replace the whole thing while we’re at it —’bout time, anyhow. Tomorrow I’ll come back, take some measurements, and see what Pearl Mae can order on credit before her mama gets home.”

“Thank you all for doin’ this, Olney, Deacon Barlow, Jay. I know Miss Lill will make it right. I’d no idea what or how to do.” Celia meant it.

“You two did fine haulin’ in that tarp. Best you could do in the middle of the storm. Keep your front room fire goin’ tonight. There’s gonna be a draft through the house, but you’re safe enough.”

“We can go in that room now, can’t we?” Chester wiped the sweat from his brow.

Celia frowned. She’d had no intention of asking permission of Olney or anybody else and every intention to explore the minute the men cleared out.

Olney looked at Celia. “I don’t suppose it’s worth my breath to say otherwise. It’s safe enough now, I reckon, but those trunks and whatnot belong to Miz Willard. You ought to let her go through them first. She’s the last of the Belvideres, so whatever there is and what’s done with it is up to her. Y’all keep that in mind.”

He looked over at Deacon Barlow and his son. “Deacon, reckon you and Jay can keep this room under your hat for now? There’s reason I’d like to talk it over with Miz Willard before folks get wind.”

Deacon Barlow nodded. “I understand that good reason, Brother Tate. You have our word.”

Jay, wide-eyed, nodded.

Olney looked at Celia and Chester, brows raised.

“Yes, sir,” Chester vowed.

Celia smiled. If he thought she’d agreed, well, that was on him.

The men hadn’t been gone two minutes before Celia raced back up the attic stairs, a screwdriver in one hand and a flashlight in the other. “Bring that crowbar!” she called to Chester.

“Celia! You heard what Olney said. We ought —”

“I never agreed not to look!” Celia flicked on her flashlight and gingerly climbed over the broken wall, careful not to tear her dungarees. Her mama’d not stand for that.

“This place is creepy in the dark,” Chester whispered, crowbar in hand, not three feet behind.

“Dark enough to raise ghosts,” Celia quipped, deliciously scared. “Come help me with the lock on this trunk. Hold the flashlight. I’ll try the screwdriver.”

Chester frowned. “I don’t relish explainin’ to Olney that we busted locks.”

“I’m not trying to bust them, but they’re not Olney’s trunks,” Celia retorted.

“So they’re ours?”

“Just hold the flashlight, will you?” Celia wiggled the screwdriver in the keyhole. Nothing happened.

“Lift the latch on that end,” Chester ordered. “Maybe it’s not really locked.”

Celia raised the other latch, but the lid didn’t budge. She pried the middle of the lid, just above the keyhole, until the wood gave way.

Chester lifted the lid.

“Whoa! What’s all this?”

“Looks like old clothes and papers and stuff. From what Olney said I thought there’d be slave shackles or something,” Chester lamented.

Celia gave her brother a withering look. “They’d have gotten rid of all that before they ran away. Nobody could run in shackles. Anyway, I don’t think they used those all the time.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. Let’s just see what this is.” She pulled yellowed muslin from the top layer. Beneath was a wealth of black bombazine fabric —yards and yards of gathered bombazine skirt sewn to a bodice with a line of tiny buttons and edged in black tatted trim. “Wow.” Celia could hardly form the word. “It’s clothes from the war period —the War between the States, I’m sure. This is a mourning dress, and a veil —like the ones women wore when they had war dead.”

“A dress. It’s just a dress.” Chester moaned. “What else?” He pulled aside what looked like petticoats and things ladies wore underneath.

“Books. More books —look! There’s two piles of books here almost alike —looks like Les Misérables divided up into shorter books.”

“Why wouldn’t they have kept these in the library downstairs?”

Thumbing through the pages, Celia didn’t know the answer. Bookplates in the front all bore the same name: Minerva Belvidere. She checked the copyright dates. “They’re from before the war. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852. Here’s a newspaper, The Liberator, 1854. North Star, Freedom’s Journal.” Chills inched up her spine. She sat back on her heels. “It’s all . . .”

“All what?” Chester wanted to know.

“Abolitionist stuff —writings from the North about freeing slaves. Which makes no sense.” Celia pondered. “Mama said that old Mr. Belvidere was head of the Klan here, that his family owned slaves before the war. They even owned the Tate family once upon a time.”

“Nobody owns Olney Tate,” Chester argued with finality.

“His ancestors. I don’t get it. What’s this room here for if they owned slaves?”

“Maybe they kept them prisoner up here,” Chester whispered.

“That’s not what Olney said. He called this a safe house. I read about that in one of Miz Hyacinth’s books. Said it was part of an Underground Railroad —escape routes for runaway slaves.”

“My teacher said that whole thing’s made up, that nobody in the South would do such a thing —hide slaves and help them run away from their masters. She said it wasn’t Christian.” Chester crossed his arms.

“Shows what she knows. Let’s see what else is here.”

They pried open the lids of the other two trunks. One held ledgers listing what looked like everything the Belvideres had ever owned or bought, right down to silver teaspoons and homespun for slave clothes, and deeds to what looked to be the lands and boundaries of Garden’s Gate, only it wasn’t called Garden’s Gate. “Belvidere Hall,” Celia read.

“That’s what Miz Hyacinth said it used to be called,” Chester remembered.

They spent an hour combing the contents of all the chests and trunks. The most exciting finds were old coins, Confederate scrip, and a saber with a note about some battle in the Revolutionary War.

“Guess that’s it. History stuff,” Chester pronounced. “Reckon it’ll mean something to Miss Lill.”

“Reckon it will.” Celia sat back, still excited and intrigued, but a tad disappointed.

Celia lay in bed that night, wishing Miss Lill was home to Garden’s Gate, wishing she could ask the hundred and one questions running through her mind.

But Miss Lill, recently turned Mrs. Willard —owner of Garden’s Gate since her great-aunt, Hyacinth Belvidere, had passed —was away in England, looking after her injured husband, having left the estate in the Percy family’s care. The Reverend Jesse Willard had been gone into service as a chaplain major a good two years when he received his first leave home from the war —long enough to get down on one knee and place a ring on Miss Lill’s finger. They wed in the flurry of his two-week pass. At the end of that leave, he’d left her starry-eyed and miserable, bound again for the war to ease the minds and pour God’s courage into the hearts of the men he ministered to.

Six weeks later, Miss Lill received one of those telegrams nobody wants —saying he’d been wounded, sent to a hospital in Britain. Despite the war and perils of crossing the Atlantic, Miss Lill had finagled and paid, finding a way to get herself shipped to England, leaving the charge of Garden’s Gate to Celia and Chester’s mama.

Miss Lill had been nothing but good to them ever since she’d come to No Creek, letting them live and work with her and Miz Hyacinth at Garden’s Gate while their daddy was serving time for running moonshine and later as he worked at the shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia.

But the idea of waiting for Miss Lill to return to untangle the mystery of the attic room was intolerable —a new word Celia was using every chance she got.

Nearly asleep, Celia stared at stars through her window —ones that shone brightest in the clear March night —when the thought came to her about what Miss Lill had found in her grandaunt Hyacinth’s hope chest, after she’d passed. Lots of stuff —a wedding dress and veil, books and letters and news clippings and poems. But in the bottom, in the far back corner, there was a little finger hole. When Miss Lill stuck her finger in that hole and lifted the panel, a whole new level had come to light —a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, full regalia, and with it some crazy stories from the Belvidere family’s past.

Celia sat up in bed and threw off the covers, the thrill of inspiration burning inside her. She pulled her robe over her pajamas and tiptoed, barefoot, up the attic stairs. Flicking on her flashlight, she climbed over the broken wall, careful not to step on tree splinters and wood shavings. She lifted the lid of the wooden chest —the one that held the copies of Les Miserables. She pulled out the dress, the books and newspapers, every little thing until she reached the bottom of the chest and ran the beam of light over the bottom, around the inside perimeter. There, in the back corner, the very same as in Miz Hyacinth’s chest, was a pinky-size hole. Celia stuck her little finger inside and lifted the edge of the wooden panel.