Emily Barker: The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

It was a graveyard, a small one. Through the trees she could make out the white glimmer of tombstones; a rusted iron fence surrounded the graves like a border of tattered lace. The path led to an arched entrance, also iron, with a gate that was not so much hung from the fence posts as propped up against them. With some effort, Nora wrenched it open and stepped inside.

Nora had a weakness for country cemeteries. She and Adam had spent one summer crouching on overgrown graves and risking Lyme disease as they copied down Victorian funerary verses for one of Nora’s papers, “Voices in the Grass: Strategies of Faith and Subversion in the Post-Romantic Epitaph.” Here, the most recent graves were just over a hundred years old. The oldest dated back to the 1830s. About half of the tilting, lichen-spotted stones bore the same surname, Clement. A family burying ground, filled over a few generations and then abandoned. Out of habit, Nora stooped to read one of the inscriptions, a few lines of verse written in the slanting pothooks of the time.

Read this, take heed, and gain from my sad fate.

For you the way is open. I must wait,

Condemned for centuries long to guard this gate.

Make haste, pass through, the hour is growing late.

Strange, rather creepy. What was this about watching and guarding? The usual Protestant dogma of the period taught that the dead would sleep quietly until called for, when the Last Trump blew. The meek members of the resurrection, Dickinson said. Yet the speaker in this poem spoke as a restless ghost, spying on the living, guarding the gates of death. Of course, Nora thought, the nineteenth century was the heyday of the ghost story, but it was strange to find this view of the unquiet dead expressed on a tombstone.

She looked at the name on the stone: Emmeline Anne Clement. Died May 11, 1833, AE 18 years, 3 months.

May 11, today’s date. The coincidence wasn’t spooky as much as sad, that Emmeline Anne had died so young on a spring day that was the match to this one. “Poor Emmeline,” Nora said aloud. “I’m sorry you had such a short life. I hope it was a happy one.” Happier than mine, she thought morosely.

She decided that she might as well make a note of the inscription, in case she ever got around to revising her tombstone paper. She put her hand on her back pocket, intending to sacrifice the flyleaf of Pride and Prejudice —but she had nothing to write with. Well, she could memorize the verses and write them down later.

Nora read the poem aloud, then again to make sure that she had memorized it—she was secretly proud of how easily she could learn poetry by heart; none of the other grad students seemed to bother—and then straightened. The rain had stopped. The forest looked lighter.

“Emmeline, I have to leave now,” Nora said. Having spoken to the dead woman already, she felt a dim obligation to say good-bye. She wondered what had happened to Emmeline Anne Clement on that other May 11. Fever, consumption, childbirth? There was no shortage of ways for young women to die in 1833. “I’m sorry that you had such a short life,” she added, “and that you’ve been waiting here for so long. I wish—”

But, she reflected, what could you wish for the dead? Wasn’t that really the essence of death, to be beyond the power of hopes and wishes? Still, Nora had the urge to leave this lonely grave with some sort of blessing.

“I wish that you were free of guarding that gate, if that’s what you want, Emmeline,” she said haltingly. “I wish you could move on to the next thing, or stage, or place, and be happy.”

Edging among the stones back to the gate, Nora was a little surprised at herself. She remembered trying to talk aloud to EJ in the months after his death, telling him she missed him, but the one-sided conversations had never been much comfort. It wasn’t as though he could hear her.

Nora closed the gate behind her as best she could, then set off back along the path. Thankfully, she noticed, her ankle felt better. The rain seemed to have stopped for good, and she caught glimpses of blue sky between the thick leaves overhead. It was warmer, too—almost hot—despite the shade in the forest. The ground had already dried. After a few minutes, the trees in front of her thinned out, giving way to an expanse of sunlit grass. She must be coming back to the mountaintop. All she had to do now was circle around the Bald until she found the path back to the cabin.

But at the edge of the forest, she came to a dead halt. Stretching before her was a lush green lawn surrounding a long reflecting pool. In the center of the water a satyr embraced a nymph, carved in some honey-colored stone. Pouting, the nymph was pushing the satyr away, but not very hard, and meanwhile her draperies were sliding advantageously down her breasts and thighs. The satyr seemed to wink at Nora over his partner’s shoulder. On the other side of the lawn was a tall privet hedge with an oval gateway.

Puzzled, Nora stepped onto the grass. She couldn’t quite work out where she had gone astray. Perhaps this was another part of the mountaintop that she hadn’t seen before.

She crossed the lawn and looked through the opening in the hedge. On the other side were gravel paths and a profusion of rosebushes in full bloom. Their scent was overpowering. Nora hesitated for a moment, then followed the path, stopping now and then to bury her nose in the blossoms.

An arbor with a white lattice gate waited at the far end of the rose garden. Nora pushed it open and discovered an allée of elm trees leading to a folly shaped like a small Greek temple, which turned out to be an entrance to another walled garden, where narrow paths snaked around overgrown beds of lilies and more roses. A small green door in the wall led to a Japanese garden of pines and knobby stones.

Nora sank down on a bench in the diminutive teahouse beside the pond, where fat red koi were swimming. This garden is incredible, she thought. It must be part of some grand mountain estate, like Biltmore in Asheville. She wondered why no one at the party last night had mentioned it. She watched the rippled reflection of trees in the pond and felt an unusual sense of calm. Normally, she’d be nervous about trespassing on someone else’s property, especially property that obviously belonged to someone very rich. But it was hard to feel ill at ease in the middle of this lush, well-ordered beauty.

Sooner or later, she would come across a groundskeeper and ask for directions home, or to use a phone. All the plantings looked well tended, and the paths were raked clean. Remarkable that the trees here were in full leaf while those on the mountain still had the gauzy, pale-green foliage of early spring. Perhaps these grounds were situated in some sort of sheltered microclimate that allowed the trees to leaf out and summer flowers to bloom early.

It was certainly warm enough to be summer already. Nora found, suddenly, that she was very thirsty. She stood up and resumed her walk, wondering if it would be safe to drink from one of the fountains. The garden seemed to have no end to it. She passed through a cobble-paved herb garden; a topiary menagerie of green dragons, unicorns, and other mythological beasts that she didn’t recognize; an enclosure where all the flowers were such a dark purple that they looked black. Finally, after what could have been an hour or just a few minutes of wandering—her watch seemed to be alternately halting and skipping—she turned a corner to find herself facing a brilliant blue swimming pool, surrounded by more of those high, clipped hedges. At the near end of the pool was a pink marble sculpture, something abstract that reminded Nora of an anatomical model. At the other end of the pool were a pair of white lounge chairs and a matching table with a glass pitcher and a couple of glasses.