Chapter 1

C HAPTER 1

Boston, Massachusetts

April 1894

Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

—Horace Greeley

Death lay heavy upon Marigold Manners's mind the late winter morning that set her on the path to the scarecrow—death but not yet murder.

That gray morning, Marigold gripped the seat of the cheap, chilly hansom cab trudging through Boston's cold, cobbled streets, closed her eyes, and wept. Quietly. Intensely. Briefly.

One didn't want to give way to emotion or make too much of oneself. Nor ruin one's looks. Not now, when she needed to preserve every advantage she might have. Because the gold that had given its name to the age had tarnished into tinsel. Her gilded youth had come to an abrupt, inconvenient end.

Today she would count the family lawyers amongst the crowds of Horace Greeley's idlers and imbeciles, for they did not give her such sage advice as Mr. Greeley—and even his advice was sadly lacking. Why did no one ever say, "Go West, young woman "?

Why were the modern, forward-thinking Miss Marigold Mannerses of the world not given such expansive advice? Why did the attorneys harp and carp like moralizing old puritans, insisting she retreat and retrench instead of boldly going toward the future?

Why was everyone not so superbly, rationally modern as she?

Marigold dried her eyes, paid the driver from her dwindling purse, and stepped over the late-season slush on Fenway's Park Drive quite determined to forge her own path forward—to do what she was meant to do and let the world learn to catch up. Behind her were the hours she had spent within the austere offices of Ropes, Grey and Loring, Esquires. Before her stood a tall, handsomely appointed townhouse, the door flung wide in welcome.

It was a wonderful thing to have rich friends.

"How was the reading, darling?" Her confidante and dear friend, Isabella Dana, kissed her cheek and swept her into the townhouse's opulent, cocooning warmth.

"Dreadful," Marigold admitted. "Nearly as dreadful as the funeral." She unpinned her black velvet hat with the chicly netted mourning veil—there was no excuse for looking dreadfully unfashionable, no matter the dreadful occasion—to better let herself be cocooned. "In fact, I've quite resolved never to have one of my own—neither a funeral nor a will to be read out."

"But you'll have to have a will now that you're an heiress," Isabella soothed as she steered Marigold toward the elegant sitting room. "You have my congratulations along with my condolences. I've poured sherry."

"That, dear Isabella—Oh, thank you! You have no idea how welcome this is." Marigold took the proffered glass gratefully. "That is the most dreadful news of all—not that losing my darling parents to the influenza has been anything but the most awful wrench." Her only comfort was in the knowledge that they had died within hours of each other—neither would have wanted to live on alone. "But I am told I am not, in fact, an heiress. It seems my sweet mater and pater squandered it all."

"What, all?" Isabella clutched the back of a velvet armchair to steady herself. "Harry and Esm é lost all the Manners money?"

"Lost is not quite the right verb." The shock had already passed for Marigold. All she had left was the damning truth. "But yes, all." She took a fortifying sip of the sherry and let the rich wine restore what was left of her equanimity. "Not that I'm surprised—my parents always were spendthrifts, the poor dears."

She had been a child when she first understood what the leaking mansions and hasty departures from hotels really meant—her beloved parents were absolute fools with money. Still, she had admired their verve, if not their unsound personal fiscal practices.

"I know your dear father liked to gamble, but Marigold, darling, to spend it all ?" Isabella put her hand to her stylishly rounded bosom as if to hold back the enormity of the loss. "The Manners family is so distinguished, so very industrious—how could several hundred years' worth of New England thrift be gone?"

"Indeed," Marigold agreed on a sigh. "One would think it a Herculean task to run through so much money in just one lifetime, but they managed it quite spectacularly."

"Good Lord." Isabella was still aghast. "I know you were estranged from them, as they didn't approve of your devotion to your education—"

"Heavens, no." Marigold had peacefully separated herself from her parents' hurly-burly lifestyle by the age-old convenience of boarding school, and then—horrors of all horrors—enrolling in Wellesley women's college. She was a modern, academic New Woman in all ways, with a strong, well-regulated mind residing in an equally strong, well-regulated body. My darling changeling , her sweet mother had laughed—for how could such beautiful profligates as her parents have produced such a serious-minded child? "By their account, marriage is the only way a young lady of good breeding should secure both her future and her family fortune. But now there is no fortune left to secure."

Isabella was still too flummoxed to appreciate Marigold's attempt at humor. "The Beacon Hill townhouse?" Isabella seemed to be going through a sort of inventory in her head, searching for potentially hidden assets. "The summer place on the Cape?"

"Gone, sold on the sly for debts last year, the lawyers tell me." Marigold tried to maintain both her good humor and her good sense, but the truth was, it was quite an off-putting experience to find oneself a pauper.

"My darling girl!" Isabella gasped in companionable disbelief. "Not that you ever cared about the money—but to have none! I can't imagine the shock." She hastened to refill Marigold's glass.

"Thank you. Though the lawyers did manage to secure me a small annuity of one hundred dollars per annum, I know very well that I can't live the life I'd chosen on such a pittance in this day and age."

"Oh, no," Isabella agreed on a solicitous gasp. "Not and maintain any reasonable kind of style."

"Exactly," Marigold confirmed. "Nor afford to even finish my degree in classical studies—apparently my college tuition has not been paid for quite some time. Which also means I must cancel my plans for the archaeological field season on Kefalonia this summer." Everything she had worked so hard to accomplish was now out of reach. "You see why it's all so dreadful." Marigold allowed herself some small measure of bitterness at the unfairness of fate. "This is supposed to be the Progressive Era, but my life does not seem to be progressing at all. The august attorneys of Ropes, Grey and Loring have advised me that if I wish to remain a lady of good repute, I must fall back on finding some family relations to take me in."

"Relations?" Isabella uttered the word in the same tone one might normally reserve for rodents or reptiles . "Oh no, you must stay here with me instead. I adore your company, we get along famously, and there's plenty of room." She waved her hand at the gracefully spacious surroundings. "Just the thing for a well-positioned widow like myself to take on a prot é g é e."

Marigold's pride had already prepared her for just such a generous offer. "You are a dear, Isabella, but I think we both know I'm far too independent to be anyone's prot é g é e, let alone yours. I don't know enough about fashion—apart from being fashionably dressed—to be of any help in your atelier."

"Nonsense—you're a walking advertisement for the utter perfection of my creations. The House of Dana is daily visited by young ladies vying to look as smart and effortlessly elegant as the inimitable Miss Marigold Manners."

"Thank you, but I am hardly unique. And what happens now that I can no longer afford to look so smart?"

"Darling! What kind of friend would I be if I charged you to wear my clothes?"

"What kind of friend would I be if I let you give me clothes for free?"

"The well-dressed kind," Isabella rejoined with some exasperation.

"You know it won't do," Marigold countered. "It's bound to get out that I'm a pauper, and then where will I be—pitied!" Marigold shuddered at the thought and took another deep, meditative sip of her sherry. "And despite all this, I'm still quite set on becoming a fashionably iconoclastic, classical archaeologist. I am in the process of convincing myself the harsh realities of poverty will be instructive in the art of living in archaeological encampments."

Marigold had spent the winter in detailed planning, imagining her summer on the Greek island of Kefalonia, digging at the classical period site at Leivathos—the evening breeze off the Ionian Sea would waft across her journal, which would be filled with drawings of artifacts and site plans …

"Life is never as one imagines, darling," Isabella objected. "Real poverty is bound to be exceedingly tedious and messy, and you know how you feel about messes, Marigold. You're always tidying up and improving things."

This, Marigold acknowledged with a sigh, was the result of a childhood spent in uncertain wandering. Her parents had been first-class nomads, always in search of somewhere suitably chic to shore up. Always leaving a messy string of unpaid bills and disgruntled shopkeepers behind. All that traipsing about had left Marigold with an excellent vocabulary, a strong sense of self-reliance, and an abiding wish for structure and stability. The Viennese physicians might write of unmet needs and wish fulfillment, but Marigold thought her penchant for creating order out of chaos extraordinarily rational—and altogether the perfect mind-set for an archaeologist.

"Well, you need absolutely no improving," she told Isabella. "You're already perfection."

"Thank you, darling," Isabella cooed. "Then why not just stay here as my friend and companion and improve someone else? I can think of several young gentlemen—and quite a few older ones, too, for you know how profitable such an alliance can be for a young lady of your age and sophistication. You're perhaps not a superb beauty, but you have something more—you have panache."

It was a lovely compliment coming from Isabella, who was one of the languid beauties of the age and had both looks and panache. She had consequently married young and profitably to a wealthy bon vivant some forty years her senior, who had had the good manners to die in time to leave Isabella an attractively rich, stylish young widow.

"I should like the advantages of widowhood without having the inconvenience of marriage," Marigold admitted on a sigh. "My plan has always been to become a leading academic archaeologist. But now even my expensive education will do me no good. Without the backing of my college, I can't afford to go to Greece on my own. And without either extensive field experience or a finished degree, I can't teach."

"You'll have to do something to remain independent," Isabella warned. "If you won't marry, do you think you might try your hand at some"—she searched for a tactful word—"lesser job? A typist, perhaps? At least you'd have pin money."

"What a dismal prospect. Not that I'm afraid of work, but I had hoped to be working at something more … important ." Marigold was a progressive woman of a progressive age, but to what purpose? "Mr. Ropes, the lawyer, insisted letters be sent to each and every one of my remaining relatives, so I shall have to deal with that as well, for I can't imagine any of them will come up to scratch."

Isabella nodded. "Quite right to have standards. And speaking of standards—I thought we'd have a quiet dinner here then go out for some dancing."

"Dancing? Not even a week after my parents' funeral?" It was finally Marigold's turn to be shocked. "Dear Isabella—"

"A celebration of life, just as they would want, for life goes on, and in your particular situation, life must go on." Isabella pursed her lips. "And certainly, when everyone finds out the state they've left you in, no one will begrudge you a little dancing before you're forced to face the wolves at the door."

"Let us hope Mr. Ropes and his firm will deal with any wayward wolves."

"Well, I have a very different sort of wolf in mind for your evening." Isabella set aside her glass. "The sporty set are hosting a little soiree down at the boathouse on the Charles. And you are quite sporty—the collegiate champion at golf and rowing for Wellesley?"

" Was sporty, for that's all in the past, now that I must leave college. One doesn't want to make too much of oneself—especially now."

"No indeed. But the right sort of people will be there."

What Isabella invariably meant by the "right sort" were Harvard men.

"You know my views, Isabella. I'm modern —I have no plans whatsoever to marry." Most colleges and universities insisted their female academics remain strictly single. "No plan, no inclination, and now no money—for what man in his right mind would want a pauper? And you know I could never countenance a man who was not in his right mind."

"I commend your forward thinking, darling, but even a pauper—especially a pauper—doesn't want to put herself too far beyond the pale. I don't think you'll like the social wilderness," Isabella warned.

"Perhaps I should consider the real wilderness," Marigold mused. "Perhaps I ought to take Mr. Horace Greeley's advice in the newspaper and go west instead of going to Greece. That's what that savage old man, Mr. Clemens, did to make himself into Mark Twain."

"Savage?"

"The man evinced outright disdain for the works of Jane Austen," Marigold replied. "What else is such a man but a savage?"

"There won't be any savages at the boathouse this evening," Isabella assured her. "Cab is sure to be there."

Marigold's breath bottled up in her throat, but she carried on as if nothing had happened—as if every fiber of her being hadn't been instantly doused in secret delight. "Cab who?"

"You know very well Cab Cox."

Jonathan Cabot Cox was just the sort of fellow Marigold might have expected to encounter at a Charles River boathouse. Scion of one of Boston's oldest families, Cab had grown up basking in the sunny rays of wealth and privilege, excelling at any number of expensive sports and attending the requisite exclusive boarding school before enrolling in college at Harvard, where he had joined the right clubs and rowed crew before processing onward to Harvard Law. All as if it were preordained by a right-thinking, puritan God.

She had met him at various regattas and picnics over the years, but Marigold had never actively pursued anything more than friendship—she had too much pride to allow herself to admire a man everyone else idolized.

He was simply too handsome, with the sort of strong, blade-sharp jaw one would expect to find on a fellow who rowed stroke and captained the varsity eight. And there was something too casual about the sweep of sandy hair that often fell just so across his broad forehead. Something too flawless about his conservatively tailored clothes.

He was, simply put, too tidy, too strong, and too self-assured to be an interesting subject for any improvement. Or affection.

So naturally, he could not have attracted her more.