Free The Dark Closet by Miranda Beall Page A

“Slaves and Slave Days in Southern Maryland,” “The New Federal Reserve Banks, Their Capital, and Deposits,” the death notice of Dr. Mudd, “Burial of the Confederate Dead.”
    There were even recipes for peach wine , a two-gallon jar (of what was not specified), blackberry cordial, and three pages of puddings—potato, bread, citron, American, sweet potato, Indian, ground rice. And beneath most of the articles on most of the pages were the nearly-obliterated  handwritten genealogies of the Mainwaring family and all branches therefrom or therewith, drafts of letters, diary-like recordings of visits.
    I t was in one of these scrapbooks that Crossett actually came across several columns by The Rambler. He was very much surprised because he had assumed The Rambler was a contemporary phenomenon, but judging from the dated scrapbooks in which he found the columns, The Rambler was either very, very old or knew the secret of regeneration. This made it all the more perplexing that no one apparently knew who he was, as Twynne had told him. Had The Rambler managed to keep his identity a secret for over a century? Amused and intrigued, Crossett began to read through The Rambler headlines: ”The Rambler Visits the Burial Place of General Marburk Mainwaring,” said the first one. That was an ancestor with whom Crossett was not familiar. Another announced “The Rambler Visits Barrow in Leggett County,” in which The Rambler gave the etymology of the town’s name, derived from the Old English bearwe, meaning basket or wheelbarrow. He went on to say that the old families of Barrow were importing pianos from London as well as cases of books, plates, and pictures while their neighbors to the west were still sporting bearskin caps and deerskin skirts as they traded with the Indians. He reported that Barrow, a wheat and tobacco region, boasted a host of old plantations: Barrow Mansion, Rivers Chance, Independence, Warenne’s Grove, Forster’s Pleasure, Winterhurst, Rezin’s Levels, Teilbright’s Green, Whetherton, Wightefield. Crossett looked at the date on the article: February 22, 1907. The next article was entitled ”With the Rambler,” dated to May 6,1848, and described Poplar Hill, a Mainwaring holding famous for its silver poplars, which The Rambler said was a common tree found planted close to the old mansions, especially among Catholic plantation owners since, according to legend, it is from this tree that the cross upon which Christ died was carved. To this day, the legend continues, its leaves still shiver in fear that it might be used again for such a purpose.
    Crossett remembered Poplar Hill. He had never seen it himself but his father used to speak of it with great bitterness because it had slipped from Mainwaring hands to a respective nobody, a Mr. Jackson Wilbon, who turned out to be a far shrewder investor than the current crop of Mainwarings. He had bought the estate considerably under market value from its widowed mistress, who had been overwhelmed by grief and the prospect of estate management. Eleven years later in 1945 he sold it for three times the amount to Deerwood Baptist Church for a school and home for retired pastors. Crossett’s father had raged on the subject of Deerwood Baptist, which had broken the bounds of the borough of Deerwood to penetrate the borders of Barrow, staunchly Catholic except for a few diehard Anglicans (like the Mainwarings). The 1799 Federal brick house at Poplar Hill had been on the Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage every year from 1923 to 1934, a claim even Winterhurst could not make, despite its elaborate and impressive architecture and history. Known for its entrance hall staircase that wound to the third floor, Poplar Hill’s moldings and plaster cornices depicted tobacco leaves and grapes, classical urns and swags. It was a tribute to the era that had spawned it but had gone to ruin in the eleven years during which Mr. Wilbon had held it, waiting for the right