Chapter 10

C HAPTER 10

It is better to be beautiful than to be good.

But it is better to be good than to be ugly.

—Oscar Wilde

While Marigold might not count herself among the unhappy, she was still among the impatiently curious. And hungry.

So as soon as she saw Lucy at the door carrying a tray laden with savory cheese and sausages for Alva Hatchet's afternoon meal, Marigold stepped up. "I'll take that in," she volunteered.

"Not in," Lucy warned. "Just knock and leave it on the little table next to the door. Understand? And don't think you can sneak a bite."

"Naturally." Despite protests from her empty stomach, Marigold left the delicious-looking meal intact and even added a fresh cup of tea before she took the heavy tray to the end of the hallway. "Great-Aunt Alva? It's Marigold Manners, Esm é 's daughter. I've brought you your tray."

No answer came from behind the door, though Marigold was sure she could hear some furtive movement—and certainly there was a shadow under the door. "It's Marigold, Esm é 's girl." She crouched down so the old lady might see her if she were peeping through the keyhole. "I'd like to speak to you."

"What do you think you're doing?"

Marigold whirled to face her inquisitor and found herself looking up at the most beautifully belligerent young woman she had ever beheld.

"I said, what are you doing?"

"I'm leaving your grandmother her tray." Marigold could only state the obvious.

"Did you poison it?"

Somehow the accusation was easier to take the fourth time—Marigold had become inured by its repetition. "No, it is not poisoned. You must be Daisy. I've been hoping to meet you. Especially because our family seems to have a penchant for floral names—I'm Marigold." The darker, shorter counterpart to this slim, wildflower daisy.

Marigold made sure to smile in what she hoped was a kindly manner, because her brain was too distracted to be entirely sure. Cleon had said—she realized now—that Daisy resembled Marigold's mother. And though the girl was tall—far taller than either Esm é or Marigold, and nearly as tall as her brother, Seviah—she had all the delicate Sedgwick bone structure and porcelain skin that had made Esm é one of the breathless beauties of her age.

But this beauty had none of Esm é 's air of innocence—she regarded Marigold with narrowed eyes, all leery, cynical suspicion. "I know who you are. Ma's always gawping on about you."

"Is she?" How odd, when Sophronia seemed to have so very little interest in speaking with Marigold directly. "No matter. I am glad to finally make your acquaintance."

"Well, the feeling ain't mutual." The girl tossed back an untidy braid of long blonde hair.

Her costume, for lack of a better word, was a hodgepodge of patched garments that appeared to have been handed down equally from her brothers and her mother. She wore a long leather skirt with a tattered hem, topped by an overlarge blanket-wool wrap that looked as if it might once have been under a saddle. Practical if not rational dress.

And still she was so beautiful she took Marigold's breath away.

"I'm sorry," Marigold said, judging that the direct approach was best. "I'd like for us to be friends."

"I don't give a bleached barnacle what you'd like. You're just like them—all for what you can get. And I hate you for it. I hate you, do you hear?"

"I do." As surely had everyone else in the house, especially Great-Aunt Alva. Marigold heard the door latch behind fall—the tray had disappeared into the old lady's room without another sound.

But this old bird in hand would stay in hand, so Marigold set out for the bush, determined to follow Daisy, if for no other reason than to gaze at her mother's face again. Despite the late-afternoon hour, Marigold followed her out of the house, across a dry weedy area that might once have been a kitchen garden, and down a twisting path through the woods.

She just managed to keep the girl in sight on the ankle-twisting trail along the eastern shore before she finally caught up to her cousin at the northernmost point of the island, where the underlying granite had thrust up to form a small bluff.

Daisy stood at the edge, looking out across the dark, gray water with a sort of reverent longing at the sunshine on the other side.

"What an extraordinarily lovely view," Marigold said as she came by her side.

A wicked little pistol appeared in Daisy's hand so fast Marigold stumbled back with her hands up in instinctive, horrified plea. Such an almighty affinity for weapons, these Hatchets had!

"You're awfully dang soft-footed for a city girl," Daisy accused.

"I'm sorry." Marigold wanted to refuse to be frightened—again—but it was ferociously hard. "Please put that away. I mean no harm." She forced herself to look at Daisy, not the flashing barrel of the pistol, and made her voice as level and as friendly as possible whilst experiencing the vulgar, heart-pounding terror of being held at gunpoint. "And I'm not really from the city. Where I made my home most recently is very much the countryside."

And in that frantic moment, Marigold felt a desperate sort of longing for the beautifully landscaped, rolling hills and scenic walks that made up her college's bucolic but highly civilized campus. To be there in the cradle of learning, sheltered in its verdant park instead of quickly composing a plea for one's life on a primitive island … "I'm sorry," she repeated.

Sorry for leaving Boston. Sorry for coming to this godforsaken place. Sorry for thinking she knew better that her friends. For the first time in Marigold's life, she felt the sort of regret she had fancied other, less logical, less determined people felt when facing the consequences of terrible decisions.

Yet Marigold had not survived her tumultuous, nomadic childhood and eight years of boarding schools with clever, rich, cruelly overprivileged girls to be so easily cowed. She used the only weapon left in her arsenal of logic—honesty. "I'm here to help, if you'll let me."

"Huh." Daisy's response was little more than a huff of disbelief. "How could you help me?" But she put the pistol away into whatever sleeve or pocket it had so swiftly appeared from. "You never should have come here. You'll end up drowned like the rest of them."

That glimpse of red fabric floating on the tide filled Marigold's mind. "The rest of them?" Her curiosity—and outrage—instantly overcame her regret. "And who are they to be so callously disposed of?"

The indifferent beauty tossed up a shrug. "Them girls."

Girls wearing red skirts, floating just below the surface?

Marigold looked with sharper eyes at the stretch of Salem Sound coursing between the island and the mainland and was gladder than ever that her physical education had included water sports—she was quite determined to be hard to drown.

And harder to misunderstand.

"Then I'll withdraw my offer of help and leave you to your callous view." Marigold had seen more than enough. "It is as extraordinarily beautiful as are you yourself, though more's the pity."

"I don't want your pity. Or your help." But the tall girl's voice and expression held less force, and perhaps at least a little more … shame?

What else was she ashamed of?

Marigold followed her gaze across the sound. "Whose house is that over there, anyway?" The imposing redbrick edifice crowning the rock ledge on the opposite shore was everything Hatchet Farm was not—structurally, and presumably financially, sound. "Somebody you know—or would like to know?"

Daisy spared her a sideways glance. "You're awfully danged clever."

Marigold decided to work her way around the resentment in her cousin's tone. "Goodness, they must be very rich to own such a place. But it is beautiful." She switched her own focus from the vista to her cousin. "Like you. I meant what I said, but you're clever too—you pulled that gun on me quite cleverly."

Cleverly being a euphemism for any number of other words. Appalling , Isabella had rightly suggested. Not to mention dangerous.

But Marigold wasn't trading ironic asides with Isabella in the comfort of her Boston sitting room now. She needed to sharpen her wits if she was going to do anything more than merely survive her short stay on Great Misery Island. Or find out if girls had actually been drowned. "Are you any good with it?"

Daisy didn't bat a blonde eyelash. "I could shoot your eye out."

"Please don't. But I'd like to be able to do that." Marigold made sure her voice was admiring, even as she wondered why Daisy had needed to acquire such expertise.

"Fancy you wanting anything of mine." Daisy's scoff was very nearly a sneer. "But that's what you're here for, ain't it, to take away everything that's ours?"

"No," Marigold assured her with the same sincerity she had assured the girl's brothers. "I give you my word that I am only here for a visit. I do not want, and pledge never to take away, any part of Hatchet Farm." Not unless it was hers or her mother's by right—but she could not imagine how that would be. "My ambition is to be an archaeologist, not a farmer."

"Don't know what that is. And don't know you well enough to take your word." For all her ethereal looks, Daisy was as eminently practical as Marigold—which, of course, earned Marigold's respect.

"You are quite right—we don't know each other at all. What would you like to know about me?"

"Why're you here?" Daisy asked the same question Lucy had. "Fancy Boston girl like you out here in all this everlasting loneliness and wind? I'll never believe you came out here just to boil our laundry."

"Because your mother wrote me to say I needed to come right a great wrong done to my mother. Do you know what that wrong was?"

"No," Daisy answered with a return to her native cynicism. "And even if I did know, I don't know as I would tell you."

"Naturally." These Hatchets all had secrets they were determined to keep. But with every minute that passed, Marigold was becoming equally determined to unravel them all.

See if she wasn't.