What Thelma described to them about the rocks Lily Topple found on the trail matched up like perfect puzzle pieces to what the old woman had told Charlie and Sam and Malachi.
“When we first started comparing Gideon Witch stories a couple of days ago, Sam mentioned how Liam had tossed a rock through the Jabberwock that first day to see if it’d vanish,” Charlie said. “Do you think maybe Lily’s father could see through the Jabberwock like that, maybe even see the little girl standing there on the trail?”
“I don’t believe the Jabberwock is the same now as it was a hundred years ago. It’s much bigger and stronger. That’d be the natural progression, don’t you think?”
“And you say Rose Topple called it ‘the Jabberwock’?” Sam said. “Did she tell you why?”
“She said her mother called it that because that’s what it was. She said” — Thelma paused to get it right — “‘it didn’t have no name so it took the Jabberwock for its very own.’”
“How would her mother have known that unless …?” Charlie asked.
“The Jabberwock told her. It talked to her.” Thelma held up a hand to ward off the host of questions she could see coming. “I asked about it and Rose wouldn’t say any more. Which, of course, begs a whole host of other questions — how did it talk to her? What form did the communication take? It wasn’t words on a blackboard. Even if there’d been one, Lily Topple couldn’t read.”
Charlie shook her head. Her voice was soft. “And what else did the Jabberwock tell Lily that it’d be reeeeally helpful to know right now?”
The group was quiet for a little while, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Malachi picked up the conversational ball and ran a different way with it.
“You said you’d get back to it later,” Malachi said. “I want to hear about the Quaker village that was there before Gideon.”
Charlie stopped breathing. She had been dreading this part.
“Did it … vanish, too?” she asked.
“It disappeared, but it didn’t vanish. It was wiped out by Indians and burned to the ground.”
“Well, that’s good news!” Charlie said, then looked around. “I don’t mean good news that all those people were massacred, but—”
“We get it,” Malachi said.
“There’s not much of a story to tell. Quakers were part of the westward migration through the Cumberland Gap after Thomas Walker discovered it in 1750, and apparently, a small group of them crossed the mountains and decided to stay in Fearsome Hollow, built a settlement they called Carthage by the waterfall.”
“Why?” Sam asked. “I mean, it’s a beautiful place and all, but why would you settle in mountains? The Quakers were farmers, weren’t they? Not a whole lot of tillable land in Fearsome Hollow.”
“Not now, there isn’t, but we’re talking almost two hundred years ago. Topography changes. It wasn’t a very big village, I don’t think, a handful of families with lots of kids, maybe — so there must have been enough land to grow crops to feed themselves. And remember, the woods were teeming with game. Boonesborough had been there for twenty years by 1795 and it would have been a thriving little metropolis — less than a week’s travel away.”
“Sure … just a week on horseback, right next door,” Malachi said.
“Maybe they settled in Fearsome Hollow because it was remote. The people in Boonesborough might really have been the nearest neighbors.”
“Which meant nobody saw the smoke and came running to help,” Charlie said.
“They might not have come running even if they’d seen smoke. The Quakers weren’t popular among the other settlers who branched out from Virginia. They dressed funny, held to strict moral codes about honorable behavior and honesty.”
“And that made them people you definitely wanted to avoid because …?” Sam asked.
“They had other queer ideas — you know, like God created all people equal — the radical ideology that prompted Pennsylvania Quakers to build the Underground Railroad.”
Thelma smiled.
“They didn’t lie when they told authorities there were no slaves on the premises — because in their minds, the people with black skin hiding in their root cellars were not slaves.”
“Quakers were pacifists, weren’t they?” Sam asked and Thelma nodded.
“And that would have been problematic. On the frontier, settlers had to band together to protect themselves against the Indians. The Quakers wouldn’t fight — which, I’m sure, is why the village was wiped out when the Indians attacked.”
“If the people were massacred, and the village burned down, and there weren’t any neighbors … how did you find out they were there in the first place, or what happened to them?” Malachi asked.
“I was looking up the genealogy records of the Tibbits family — traced them back to Boonesborough. Vernon Tibbits ran an inn there — but more important, his wife Naomi faithfully kept a diary!”
Charlie smiled, imagining Thelma’s face when she came upon such a treasure trove of historical information.
“An entry dated 18 June, 1820 mentioned a woman who stayed at the inn whose name was Mary Whitt.”
Thelma reached out to the pile of information she’d dumped on the table from the manila envelope and pulled from it a notebook. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for.
“Naomi wrote that Mary Whitt was a white woman who’d been held captive by Indians for twenty-five years.” Thelma read from the page, “Mary was a Quaker and they built a town called Carthage beside the waterfall on Troublesome Creek. Then the Indians come, kilt the men, carried off the women, and burned everything to the ground. So the Indian raid must have been in 1795.”
“That’s all you know about Carthage?” Malachi asked.
“No. Have you ever been to Shakertown?”
Malachi and Sam shook their heads but Charlie said, “I have.”
“When I was in college a group of us went down to Pleasant Hill to eat in the restaurant.” They’d toured the grounds, too, explored dozens of preserved buildings that displayed the Shakers’ amazing craftsmanship. “I didn’t know that Shakers and Quakers were the same thing.”
“Oh, they’re not, but they’re similar.” That sent Thelma down a rabbit trail of descriptions of how the different Quaker sects developed. Thelma Jackson was the quintessential teacher.
“The Pleasant Hill Shaker Village is a National Historic Landmark. It was built in 1805, grew to a membership of three hundred people who worked 1,800 acres of land for almost half a century. That’s where I came upon the only other mention of the village wiped out in the Indian raid. I found a Bible there the Shakers called the Carthage Bible.”
The Bible was a big, leather-bound King James Bible, kept in a glass case because the pages were so fragile.
“They called it the Carthage Bible because of what was printed on the blank page in the front of the book. Under the words ‘Carthage Angels’ was a list of seventeen names. Below them were the words, ‘Please, please forgive us. Mary Whitt, 7 October, 1830.”
Thelma reached out again to the pile of information from the manila envelope and searched through it until she found a single sheet of typing paper.
“I copied the names down,” she said, holding out the sheet. “And I never found these names connected to any descendants I tried to trace, which would make sense if they were killed in a massacre.”
Sam took the sheet and began to read.
“‘Forgive us,’” Charlie mused. “That’s kind of an odd thing to say, don’t you think? Us who?”
“And why only seventeen names?” Malachi asked. “Surely there were more than seventeen people in the settlement.”
“Maybe those were the names of Mary’s children,” Charlie said.
“They had big families, but seventeen …?”
“Not just her kids,” Sam said, looking up from the sheet. “Only three of the names here are the same as hers — Jonah Whitt, Hannah Whitt and Ruth Whitt. And they could have been Mary Whitt’s brother and sisters.”
Charlie took the sheet from Sam and scanned down the names, wondering what Mary Whitt had done. What heinous sin had she committed that she was begging for forgiveness from people who’d been dead for thirty-five years?