Chapter 12

C HAPTER 12

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

—Oscar Wilde

The long day's rigorous work led to a better night's exhausted sleep on fresh sheets and a fresher outlook on the following morning. Marigold felt boldly industrious as well as hungry, but she still could not bear the thought of eating anything prepared by the unwashed Cleon, so she turned her attention shoreward.

"Cleon?" Marigold called loudly in the morning ritual she decided to dub Waking the Dead.

"Gone," he barked as he bolted awake at the kitchen table. "I got to go fishing."

"Naturally," Marigold soothed. "How often might the mule cart be available?"

Cleon pulled a baffled face. "Cousin Ellery'll have to give the say-so. But I reckon he might be persuaded anytime the mules ain't being used to plow."

"And how often are they used to plow?" Marigold had yet to see any signs of cultivation on the island.

"Must be years, now that I think on it. Time was, used to harvest what hay there was on the field above North Cove come summertime." Cleon heaved out a sigh. "But now this rock is as bare and barren as a witch's teat, and just as cursed. The seeds fall to the ground like the sulfurous drops from Satan's d—"

"Yes, thank you, Cleon, I take your point." While Marigold could only agree with the present state of affairs, she wasn't about to accept it.

She found Lucy drawing water at the pump. "That reminds me—I need to get some soap out here." Practical considerations before the theoretical. Marigold took over the chore of pumping for her. "Are you free to accompany me to the mainland? I should like your help in navigation."

Lucy tipped her turban-clad head to the west. "It's that way."

"Yes, but once there, I will need help. I'm planning on taking all of this"—Marigold gestured to the junk strewn about the yard—"to an ironmonger."

"You mean like a blacksmith?" Lucy straightened up with a laugh. "Oh, I want to see this."

Marigold was happy to give her an exhibition of competence. "And also, I should like to meet your mother."

Lucy's ebullience faded. "What for?"

Marigold's interest in the absent Mrs. Dove was both mercenary and epicurean—she was perilously hungry. "I like making new friends." Especially friends who knew how to cook. "But mostly I'd like your company. As I said, I should like to follow your lead."

If Marigold had another reason to avoid crossing Salem Sound by herself, she kept it to herself. She couldn't forget Daisy's reference to drowned girls, nor rid her brain of that flash of dark mulberry red against the icy blue of the water. Lucy seemed the sort of person who would not fumble about with oars at such a moment.

Still, Lucy hesitated. "Then my first piece of advice would be that Mr. Ellery isn't going like you taking his mules and cart without his say-so."

"You are doubtless correct, Lucy," Marigold agreed. "But I learned long ago that it is far more expedient to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission."

"Is that what you meant by ‘Do what you're meant to do, and the world will learn to catch up'? I'll be praying Mr. Ellery don't catch you up."

"What we need to catch is the tide." Marigold didn't fancy another row against the current. "You let me worry about Ellery Hatchet—"

"Oh, I surely will."

Lucy's laugh followed Marigold into the barn, where putting the mules into harness was easier said than done—the harness was as complicated as it was dilapidated, the cart heavy and the mules mulish. And the assorted pieces of rusted iron, tin, patinated copper, and steel were a heavier chore to load than she had anticipated. It took Marigold the better part of two hours to emerge, as exhausted and bedraggled as if she had been wrung out through the washing mangle.

"I tell you what." Lucy laughed when Marigold finally led the loaded wagon into the yard. "You might look all delicate and city raised, but you aren't scared of real work, are you?"

"No, I am not." As a New Woman and future archaeologist, Marigold relished the sort of vigorous physical exertion that women of her mother's and grandmother's upbringing had disdained as unladylike.

"Pride's Crossing isn't Boston," Lucy was saying, "but I'd still recommend you wear a hat if you're wanting to look respectable-like."

"I want to look more than respectable." One had one's standards, even on a mule cart. Marigold took her cue from Lucy's ensemble of a practical but spotless pressed-wool coat and fashionable felt hat. "I'll be right back."

Five minutes, an astringent wash in rose-scented toilette water, and a fresh shirtwaist, tie, and well-tailored wool jacket later, Marigold pinned her boater hat on at a jaunty angle that brought out the best of her otherwise delicate jawline. As she'd said, she wanted to look more than respectable—she wanted to look memorable.

But it was Lucy who appeared more than memorable—in the interim, she had strapped a leather belt over her coat with a long leather sheath housing an equally long knife. "Just in case," she said in answer to Marigold's unspoken, but clearly articulated, question.

"In case of what?"

"Trouble." Lucy shrugged the same way the Hatchets did—as if trouble were both inevitable and not worth mentioning all at the same time. "I don't take anything or anyone"—she drew the wicked blade out of its sheath and let it glint in the sunlight—"at face value. Not even you, Miss Girl. That's an even better lead you ought to follow."

Such an array of lethal weapons these Misery Islanders were wont to brandish. At least none of them was an actual hatchet—although Marigold's odd relatives might surprise her yet. "So noted. I pledge you'll get no grief from me."

"I wasn't expecting any." Lucy gave her a slow smile. "Not anymore."

"Perhaps not, but I am." Marigold decided to be frank. "I am quite sure I saw woman—or actually her skirts—floating on the tide the first evening I rowed over."

"That so?" Lucy's expression narrowed. "What happened?"

"To her? I don't know." Marigold felt all the frustration of that moment. "Cleon claimed not to have seen her, but I know what I saw." She was used to being believed. "I am not given to flights of fancy."

"I don't imagine you are," Lucy rejoined. "But you're going to have to manage a flight of some sort to unload this all into the boat and then take the mules back to the barn without getting the wind up Mr. Ellery."

"Naturally," Marigold said, though she had not yet conceived of the best possible course of action—the one that would keep her from Ellery Hatchet's notice.

Lucy was excellent, reassuring company through the dark loom of the wood and provided a welcome surprise when she steered Marigold toward the far side of the cove, behind some large rocks, where a small slipway was hidden at the edge of the woodland with a pristine, perfectly balanced sailing skiff.

"This one's mine for when I need to come and go, which Mr. Ellery doesn't like the Hatchets to do," Lucy explained. "Keeps me independent."

"Like my bicycle," Marigold answered. "Which I miss dearly." Had it been a mistake to trust her machine to the indifferent care of the driver? Perhaps the Hatchets were considered of such low account that the man felt he could get away with it?

Marigold would disabuse him of that idea at her first opportunity.

She and Lucy set to loading the skiff with alacrity, as Marigold was more than anxious to be off the island. Once done loading, she quickly set the cart back down the bumpy track to the farmyard in a state of awareness that was too close to alarm for her liking. She let the mules have their heads—they went at a steady clip at the prospect of returning to their barn—and concentrated her own energies on convincing herself that there was no logical reason for her strange dread. She was doing her Hatchet relatives a favor, and who could object to that?

Much to her relief, the barnyard was still empty when she reached it, and she had far less trouble unhitching the animals than she had had harnessing them up—it seemed no time at all before she could start back up the path at a brisk pace that was only just short of a run.

She eagerly marked her way by various landmarks she was beginning to identify—the great arching elm tree, the small stand of birches, the great, protruding glacial rock—but no sooner had she rounded that very rock than she came upon Ellery Hatchet.

At least she assumed he was Cousin Sophronia's husband, Ellery, as he was the same gaunt, blade-faced man who had argued with Wilbert yesterday morning. He had the sharp, cagey look of a rat terrier—all grit and antagonism as he stabbed his shovel into the ground at the base of a nearby boulder.

Marigold's only comfort was that he started just as violently at the sight of her as she had at him. "What are you looking at?" he growled.

"Good morning, Cousin Ellery." Marigold began as she meant to go on—with a confidence she did not entirely feel. "I am Marigold Manners, your wife Sophronia's cousin."

"I know who you are," he groused. "And you're no cousin of mine." He shifted to hold the shovel with both hands, as if he might swing it at her. "What are you doing here? Spying on me?"

"Not at all," she answered instinctively, while what she might command of her logical mind was already telling her to make for the densest part of the undergrowth if he so much as moved another step closer. "I was merely going for a walk, this being the clearest path to follow from the house."

"Well then?" He glared at her from under his wiry white eyebrows. "What are you waiting for? Get on with yourself."

"I will," she agreed, while trying to calculate to the inch how close was too close to the clearly irate man, who still gripped the shovel as if he would use it as a weapon.

At least it wasn't a hatchet.

Marigold edged by on the verge of the path, never turning her back to him, until he finally returned his attention to his strange hole in the middle of the woods. But whatever he wanted to plant there was no business of hers.

She took the rest of the trail at a run, not easing her pace until she was finally within sight of Lucy, who waited calmly with her feet crossed as she leaned against the skiff.

"Look at you!" Lucy teased at Marigold's blousy appearance. "You look like you got one foot on that banana peel and the other on your grave!"

"I ran into Ellery Hatchet."

"Say no more." Lucy gestured for Marigold to join her in launching the boat immediately. "Let's get going before he catches us both up—they say the devil's got long arms, and I don't want to test that out!"