Chapter 9

C HAPTER 9

There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact

and communion with others, however humble.

—Washington Irving

Lucy was proving far more openly curious than Marigold. "What do you want out here, anyway?"

"As I said, assistance in cleaning the house—"

"No. Why have you come out here to Great Misery? Someone like you?" Lucy eyed her up and down. "Pride's Crossing's full of your sort of people, all stylish and knowing."

"I daresay." Marigold was nothing if not self-aware. "But I might ask you the same. Cleon said your mother keeps a boardinghouse on the North Shore. Surely such a place is better that this small sh … house?" she corrected.

"I told you, I've fixed it up just as I like, like my momma did when she lived here. Got a good stove—a clean stove. Clean dishes. Everything just so. And everything's mine. All I have to do is cook for Mrs. Hatchet and bring it over to the big house. Three squares, as they say. And I'm good at it."

That explained the tray outside the door last night. "Can you do that for me? For pay, for the duration of my visit?" The hope of cleanly prepared food delivered to her room made Marigold more than willing to part with more of her meager funds.

"Maybe." The girl shrugged. "I'd have to ask."

"Naturally." Great Aunt Alva seemed to wield a great deal of influence for an old woman who never left her room. "Why might she not be agreeable?"

"No reason, any reason," Lucy laughed.

"If she is so changeable, why do you work here?"

"I got my reasons," she demurred. "The work's pretty easy. And it's got its advantages." The smile hooking up the corner of the girl's mouth intimated just what those advantages might be.

"Seviah is a handsome young man," Marigold admitted. If one liked that type of Lothario. Presumably Lucy did, which made Marigold more determined to educate the girl into having higher standards for herself. "But handsome is as handsome does."

"Now, don't go getting the wrong idea." Lucy shook her head, but then she smiled ruefully. "Haven't you ever got the idea you could make something of a man?"

"No." Marigold had never had such a feeling. She had only ever wanted to keep a man from thinking he could make something—something different or nonarchaeological—of her . "I say, make something of yourself first. Do what you're meant to do, and the world will learn to catch up."

"I'd rather nobody catch me up, thank you very much."

Marigold decided she liked Lucy's wry humor. "Then it is incumbent upon me to ask if you are employing the right precautions?" Lucy might say she had the wrong idea about Seviah, but Marigold had eyes. And ears—those moans had been particularly melodic.

"No, thank you." Lucy laughed. "I've no want to be filling my house up with by-blows."

"An admirably independent stance." The young woman was clearly sensible and rational—one could become a New Woman no matter one's education or economic status. And as a New Woman herself, Marigold knew it was her duty to help other women find the path of logical fulfillment. "We all deserve a life of our own choosing, with the opportunity to make our own choices."

"Do we now?" A one-sided smile split Lucy's wide mouth. "You sound just like my old schoolteacher in Salem, Miss Tibault. I have met a vast many white ladies like you, all improving. Usually, they're from some church. Are you Methodistical?"

"I am a-theistical, though my people were Unitarians—or contrarians, as my father liked to joke, which is a very New England thing to be." But Marigold knew her faults as well as her strengths. "I daresay it is the hallmark of my personality, this penchant for improving things." And she also knew when she was wrong. "I can see now that you, like my dear friend Isabella, need no improving from me. In fact, I fancy it is quite the other way round—I should be taking lessons from you in how to get along with these Hatchets."

"Getting along may be a stretch." Lucy laughed again. "Surviving, now—I might know a thing or two."

"Then I shall follow your lead," Marigold vowed. "And get a good lock on my door."

"That's better thinking." Lucy nodded approvingly. "Though I suppose you've come to the right place if you like to improve things." She surveyed the littered farmyard up the rise. "Like a bag of rusty nails, this place is."

"Yes," Marigold agreed with a sigh of her own as she added another item to her list—hauling away scrap metal. "I notice that stoved-in washing mangle there. I'll start with seeing if I can repair that"—even if she did not have her bicycle maintenance kit, there were bound to be tools somewhere on a working farm—"and then move on to the washing, if that would suit?"

"Told you I don't go into the house. If you've work I can do outside, then I reckon I can help you."

"And for payment in cash," Marigold clarified, determined to improve Lucy's lot. Now that Cousin Sophronia had refused the hundred dollars per annum for room and board, Marigold felt free to dispense her money elsewhere.

Lucy's indifference changed to pragmatic enthusiasm. "Then it surely does suit."

"Excellent. Whenever you're ready—all in good time and no need to rush."

"No rush?" Lucy's laugh was a rollicking, musical thing. "That just means you haven't needed to use the outhouse yet."

Now that the unfortunate outbuilding had been pointed out to her, Marigold held her nose and made use of the facility. And promptly added a load of lime and sanitary paper to her list.

And then she manhandled—or rather woman-handled, because she used levers and a wheelbarrow to do the lifting instead of brute strength—the abandoned washing mangle out of the rutted dirt and across the yard to the sunny area outside the kitchen door, where a small shed roof made a convenient alcove for the washing.

But repair was more easily imagined than done. Though Marigold had long cultivated a mechanically utilitarian bent—practical reality dictated that an archaeologist acquire competence with a tool set—the rust proved extensive and resistant to everything but repeated oiling and sanding. It took hours of discommoding toil, two broken fingernails, and one aggravating tear of her tweed skirts before Marigold was able to reassemble the refurbished parts into a workable whole.

"You look like you walked across a banana peel," Lucy laughed, but she proved herself an equally hardy soul and turned the crank over every last scrap of dirty linen Marigold could find in the ramshackle house, although her search didn't get far past the few public rooms—most of the house's narrow, warped doors were locked. And while it bothered her to think of the potentially soiled antimacassars lurking behind closed doors, Marigold took great satisfaction in the work she could do.

When they had the clean linen pegged out on a line, drying in the stiff wind off the Atlantic, Marigold turned her mind to her next project—the kitchen. For what good would clean linen do in a dirty house?

She worked around the ominous-looking pot of glutinous fish stew resident upon the stove, but nothing else—dishes, pots, pans, stove, floors, tables, walls—escaped a thorough scalding. Once the room had been scrubbed and scoured, Lucy was set to polishing up the old copper pots and pans to a hygienic shine on the steps of the breezeway while Marigold went after the more delicate assorted tableware on the cobwebbed kitchen hutch.

More than once she felt a strange chill across her arms or up her neck, though she could find no cause. Watchfulness settled upon her, but she did not slacken her efforts, and by the afternoon she had unearthed and cleaned a dust-coated tea service and put it to good use in quieting her growling stomach.

"Polishing up the silver to steal away, are you?" Seviah slouched into the room, all narrowed eyes and sharp accusation.

"I hadn't thought of that." Marigold gave him a laughing smile, as if he amused instead of irritated her. But if Lucy, who was clearly a sensible young woman, saw something of worth in the young man, Marigold had only to find it. "I thought to institute the taking of afternoon tea. Would you care for a cup?" She held a china teacup out to him.

He squinted in suspicion. "Where you'd get that?"

Marigold indicated the ancient-looking hutch behind him, now full of clean crockery. "A good cleaning makes everything cheerful and new, don't you think?"

"That what you're doing, then—attitudinizing us up with your cheerful city ways and wiles so you can slip us some poison?"

His blunt query shocked her. There was something aggressive and challenging in his stance, and although Marigold knew perfectly well that her mere presence was somehow a challenge, she was canny enough not to provoke the young man. "Hadn't thought of that either. Just trying to earn my keep the best way I know. I can't reasonably claim any wiles, but I will say I'm very good at tidying things up."

"You're very tidy yourself," he observed, not without a slight leer. "All buttoned up and not a hair out of place." He leaned over the table, one long, well-muscled arm on either side of her, caging her with the open fall of his shirt and his musky scent, intimidating her with the lit match that just seemed to appear out of nowhere under his right palm. "Wonder what it would take to muss you up?"

"Oh, a bicycle ride," she said breezily, and purposefully poured out enough tea to douse the match, quite determined to give as good as she got. "I am an accomplished and enthusiastic wheelwoman. I often go so fast I muss my hair quite considerably. It's better than sex. Do you know how to ride a bicycle, Seviah?"

"No." He was taken aback—either by the frankness of her query or the unexpectedness of her action. He stepped away from the table, tossing the spent match to the floor. "But I seen 'em. Or pictures of them."

Marigold allowed herself to sigh—not least for the dirty match marring her clean floor. "That's a pity. I do so love to bicycle. I quite like the speed and daring of it all. I had to leave my machine behind at the Pride's Crossing station, and I am anxious for it to arrive."

He seemed not to know what to do with that information, so Marigold pressed her momentary advantage. "What do you like to do, Seviah? Besides girls in the hayloft, I mean." There was more than one person who might benefit from information about the precautionary arts. "The sex is all well and good, and a healthy expression, I suppose, if you're being responsible and taking the necessary precautions with your inamoratas."

"In-an-mor …" The young man turned a gratifying shade of deep crimson red. "Now listen here—"

"I did listen." Marigold continued amiably. "And I saw, just as you intended me to. I must say, you did an admirable job of vexing your mother with your sexual liaisons—which I assume is the real gratification you derive from the encounters."

He tossed up his shoulder in a strangely aggressive shrug. "Maybe I just like to fu—"

"What's all this?"

Seviah lapsed into silence when his brother Wilbert bulled his way into the kitchen like an errant calf, dragging a tall, lethal-looking scythe behind.

Such a penchant for intimidation these young men seemed to have.

"It's tea, if you should care for some." Marigold held the cup she had proffered to Seviah out to Wilbert instead.

"That's mine!" Seviah snatched it away.

"Naturally." Marigold refused to be either annoyed or alarmed by such behavior. At the moment, she was more determined to simply set an example. "Let me pour you a fresh cup, Cousin Wilbert, while you put your scythe out back, please, where it won't be a hazard or muddy the floor, thank you so much."

She smiled sweetly to mitigate the order, but Wilbert proved as stubborn and belligerent as his younger brother and promptly laid the sharp scythe across the table in front of her, as if throwing down a metaphorical gauntlet. "Making the place over the way you'd like it, I suppose?"

"Cleaning up the place to do my share of work, yes," she agreed calmly, moving the lethal implement to lean against the wall. "How do you take your tea?"

"Never taken it," Wilbert confessed a trifle mulishly. "Never had money to waste on such fripperies."

"Then I am glad I can treat you to it." Marigold gave him a sunny, cheerful smile. "We'll try it with just a dash of sugar." A small sugarloaf was also part of the limited stores she had brought with her from Boston. Just in case. "See how you like it."

"Is it poisoned?"

"Heavens no." Their bluntness was rapidly losing the power to shock, but what a mistrustful lot they all seemed to be. "I'm drinking it too!"

"As if that means anything." But Wilbert took the tea and retreated to a nearby corner, while Marigold took the conversation in hand.

"I overheard your … discussion"—she chose her words carefully—"with your father this morning? I take it you've purchased some hogs?"

Wilbert blew on the tea and look a tentative sip. "Just a Hampshire sow and a boar to start, but they cost me a passel of actual."

"They were expensive, do you mean?"

"Yup." He slurped up a deeper, more curious drink of the tea. "Took months of saving up what I could, a little here and there, from selling extra eggs on the main." And then his face fell as he realized what he had confessed.

Marigold allayed his alarm. "How very economical. Well done."

"Don't cost nothing much to keep, them hogs. They feed up on acorns in the woods, and Cleon saves up the slops from dinner—though the devil knows the dinner is slops beginning to end."

"Is it?" Marigold was reminded by the pang in her middle that she had not taken supper with the family. "And Cleon does the cooking? He seems to be something of a jack-of-all-trades."

"More like the dog's body, doing chores nobody else wants to do. Don't get me wrong, miss—I'm fond of the old man. Fond as can be. But … he's not like other people—not right in the head. Ma calls him gawney ." He shook his head ruefully. "Then again, our family ain't like other people neither. We're a cursed, unhappy lot."

"Mmm." Marigold encouraged his confidences with some of her own. "Cleon mentioned that—the feeling-cursed part—as did your mother, in her first letter to me. She also mentioned a great wrong her husband—your father—had done my mother, though I have no knowledge of what that was. Do you?"

"Nope." But this mention of the bone of contention within the family seemed to remind Wilbert of his suspicions of her, as he put down his teacup. "I'm obliged to you for the hot drink, miss. But I've work needs doing."

"Then don't let me keep you from it. But speaking of work—do you mind if I keep on tidying things up here?" Cleaning was a good first step, but there might be other things she could do to improve their lot and earn their trust.

Wilbert shrugged. "Don't suppose I mind, if nobody else does. Be a nice change from all the dirt."

"Excellent. And if you should like your clothes laundered as well, you have only to leave them in the basket I've placed next to the kitchen door." She pointed to the receptacle.

"Fancy that," he said, taking up his scythe.

"Yes," Marigold answered with a smile. "Very fancy indeed."

Marigold saw him off with a friendly wave as Cleon crept in the kitchen door.

"Lawd," he croaked. "What happened here?"

"Cleaning," she said succinctly. "Everything has been put away where it belongs, not left to molder on the table." She wanted to set an example of how a hygienic kitchen ought to be kept.

But Cleon paid no attention to the table or cupboard, rushing instead to the narrow shelf of the chimneypiece around the stove. "Where's my little sugar pot?" he demanded.

"That rusty old jar? I didn't realize it was sugar. It looked so old and contaminated, yellow with dirt and rust flakes, that I threw it out." At the old man's distressed look, she hastily added, "But I've provided sugar from my own stock. There, you see." She gestured to the tea set she had filled from her sugarloaf.

He peered into the silver bowl at the unevenly crushed grains. "Is it poison?"

It was one thing to be asked twice, but a third time gave an entirely different impression of the Hatchets' fears—what on earth made them so suspicious of her? "No, Cleon." She dipped her pinkie in the bowl and put the sugar onto her tongue. "You see. Nothing but pure, sweet sugar."

He shook his wispy head. "I can't like it, Miss Girl. I gotta account for the foodstuffs."

"And here is your account." She held the sugar bowl out to him. "A full jar of sugar. I also thought to find some other condiments and spices, like salt and pepper and herbs—"

"Ain't got none o' that, Miss Girl." Cleon was so flummoxed he harrumphed himself out the kitchen door, while Marigold stayed put in the quiet kitchen to contemplate both what she had learned of her relatives and what she had yet to learn.

Because the thing about tidying up and organizing things was that it wasn't really about the dust on the shelves or the soiled linen—it was about discovering why people were so unhappy they didn't notice the dust or the soiled linen or the lack of spices. Improving a place really meant finding out how to help people make themselves happy.

One thing alone was abundantly clear—no one at Hatchet Farm was happy.