"...Sensible."

He doesn't know the full history of his wife after his own death - but he suspects she, too, had a hard life.

He nods. 

"I'll fetch a map we can pin to the wall and mark with the locations of various graves." 

"Smart. I suppose I'll start planning how to cover up a rash of grave robbers..."

"For what reasons are bodies usually moved...? I wonder if we could fabricate something wrong with the cemetaries such that the bodies had to be exhumed and transferred..."

"That's one reason; if we were moving far away, and wished to take our family cemetery with us - that would be eccentric, since most who do that at all just move more immediate relatives, and costly, but not impossible. It is sometimes a practice with closing questions of how someone died, or if there was an argument over whether someone should be buried or cremated, or where someone should be buried... We could also claim that we wish to have our family grouped together properly."

"That would likely be complicated by the fact that the lineage is intermittently maternal. People would want to know why Curwen's descendants specifically. Perhaps something to do with planting flowers on or by the graves..."

"Landscaping would be a good excuse, yes - flowers, trees, paths..."

"It would be a logical accompaniment to the gravestone project..." 

She nods, smiling slightly. "And won't be too difficult to arrange; fortunately our family's well off enough for such a charitable donation."

"...The newer cemeteries too. I won't do anything irreversible to her body until we're certain she'll be alright, but I want her--I want it at hand, where time and insects and other grave robbers do not threaten it." 

She nods, puts her hand over his.

His head bows, his jaw clenched tight. 

"We'll get her back. I promise. And we'll make sure it's perfect."

Deep breath. "Yes." Slow exhale. "It will be easier once I can watch over--once her body is secure." 

She suspects watching his fiance decay might be its own torture.

All that's for that is to work quickly, though.

She nods and stands. "We should get to bed; I can hardly contact people in the middle of the night."

...Nod. "Alright," he agrees reluctantly, and heads to his own bed. 

Though they make arrangements with all seemly haste, he wants to scream at the torturous slowness of it. He does not, instead pouring his frustration into every productive and semi-productive activity he can think of, going over the notes and Curwen's new additions again and again, jotting down possible experiments to try, creating plans and backup plans in case of every disaster from hurricanes to being found out and met by a mob with torches and pitchforks. 

They manage to secure one of the entrances to the catacombs, and on the moonless nights when, camouflaged by the disturbed earth of the new gardens, they retrieve the bodies of their dead, they are ferried in secret to that ancient stone edifice rather than attempting to hide the charnel odors and stacked coffins in their own cellar where servants would inevitably stumble across them. 

And Emma, in between notes and books and letters and numerous meetings with church officials and landscapers and community leaders - 

Finds time to talk to Hiram about immortality.

"I want to know how you did it," she says, one night when the candles are burning low and it's just they two in the library. Hiram has long since been introduced to the town, her household's servants included, as her nephew.

"With great difficulty. It's something one must do themselves, else my wife would have not died so easy."

"I'm no stranger to the difficulties of life."

He regards her calmly. 

"It isn't free, not yet, but I suppose you care little." He shakes his head. "I will take you on as an apprentice, but you have much life in you yet. Returning the dead takes precedence."

Her chest boils with frustration, but Emma Ward has faced worse obstacles.

"I understand," she says, and turns herself back to the deep mysteries of necromancy.

Her son, meanwhile, has attention for little else. 

Eliza was well-embalmed. When her body is finally retrieved, decay has barely set in at all--she doesn't smell nice, but she still looks almost as though she could be sleeping, as long as one doesn't jostle the hair deftly arranged over her forehead to hide the bullet hole. 

He sits with her, occasionally, when there is absolutely nothing useful he could be doing at the moment, and strokes the back of her hand or presses careful kisses to her brow. 

Hiram's vampirism fades slightly faster than his estimate had been for, and they make enormous - but not conclusive - strides in the resurrection process.

He does, fortunately, have a process for halting decay, though it will fade from something Eliza's size after about a year with no maintenance. Useful for books, and for preserving corpses. Freshness matters somewhat; this will preserve their advantage, at least.