Chapter 20

C HAPTER 20

Always forgive your enemies—nothing annoys them so much.

—Oscar Wilde

Marigold began her morning with a walk in her garden, mentally preparing for Cab and Tad's visit. While she had spent the previous evening instructing Daisy on how to conduct herself, she had not yet done the same for herself. She needed to steel herself in advance against the tumult of uncomfortable and illogical emotions that had unfortunately already given her an uneasy night. Not that any night on Great Misery had been particularly easy with her mind awhirl with the strange circumstances of Minnie Mallory's—and them other girls '—drownings.

But Cab Cox's presence in Pride's Crossing seemed … too convenient. Too coincidental.

Marigold sensed Isabella's hand stirring the pot, but Isabella could not have invented a family for Cab to visit, nor a legal case that required a Harvard Law graduate's expertise. Yet despite Cab's sunny, well-bred assurances about change and adventure, Marigold couldn't shake the uncomfortable feeling of being pursued. Perhaps another woman might be flattered by such determined pursuit, but Marigold was … undecided. She would have to tread carefully with Cab Cox.

Right after she treaded carefully around the unreasonably angry man who suddenly appeared before her.

"What's all this?" Ellery Hatchet stomped into her budding kitchen garden. "I gave no permission for this."

"I beg your pardon, Cousin Ellery," Marigold began in a tone of voice that frankly did not beg at all. "This is a garden."

"I can see that," he all but spat as he crowded her back, trying to intimidate her much the same way his younger son had tried—and failed—that first afternoon. "I didn't give permission for this!"

"No?" There was something about his exaggerated posturing that stiffened Marigold's spine. She refused to be intimidated into politeness. "I did not know I needed to consult you before feeding myself, as you seemed particularly concerned with me taking foodstuffs meant for hardworking men. Accordingly, I made other arrangements for my board and also began this garden, although the bounty is meant to be shared with the whole family."

That he was confounded by her matter-of-fact, bordering-on-insubordinate tone was evident—he sputtered at her in outrage. "Why, you intrusive har—"

"Houseguest, yes, thank you." Marigold turned away to cut him off, just as she had successfully done her first morning, but she was surprised—and delighted—to find Sophronia standing nearby with a trug filled with mushrooms and some other forage her cousin must have been picking in the woods. "Good morning, Cousin. I should think some of that chervil looks like an excellent addition to an omelet this morning."

"Ayuh," Sophronia agreed in her cryptic New England fashion, but there was something else—a sort of slyness in the corner of her eye as she glanced at her husband. "With a mushroom or two. You used to like that flavor, Hatchet."

"I'll take nothing from your snake-fed hand," Ellery spat. "And well you know it."

Sophronia didn't so much as flinch, returning calmly, "What will be, will be, Ellery Hatchet. You know that sure as you know anything."

"Don't start at me, woman, with your witchy ways. This looks to be your doing." He tossed his chin at the garden. "For your witchy tonics and tarradiddles."

"Not a bit of it," Sophronia said, "though I like it well enough. Got a good patch of earth set. Deep enough to grow a good-sized rosemary." A small, nearly imperceptible smile creased the corners of her mouth. "Though I'd advise her to put in bird's-foot trefoil."

Ellery Hatchet's response seemed entirely out of proportion to the suggestion—he shook his fist at her. "You'll do no such thing," he cawed before he returned his displeasure to Marigold. "Where did all this come from?"

"The beds? Rest assured nothing was purchased," Marigold said to placate the unreasonably irate man. "Cleon and I cobbled it together from windfallen logs, chicken manure, leaf mulch from the woods, and seaweed from the tide line, though it was none too easy to haul it all the way here."

"From the woods?" He gasped, turning frantically back to the beds. "That stupid old man! Did he help you dig it up? Where? Where did you take it from, you cursed slommack?"

"Cousin Ellery!" No matter the man's clear perturbation, there was no account for such language.

He advanced upon her, looming over her, poking his dirty finger at her in hot accusation. "I was told to let you be to the Lord, but what ye hath sown, so shall the Lord reap!"

His rage spun itself into action—he went at the garden like a maniac, twisting up plants and kicking at the dirt to uproot what he couldn't pull. "Teach you to go against me," he ranted. "Who knows what you've taken! Who knows what you've ruined, you wretched girl. Coming here, digging things up. Ruined it all."

"Stop that!" Marigold cried, and would have tried to pull him away, but Sophronia was at her elbow with a clawlike grip, holding her back out of harm's way.

"Let him be. He'll only hurt you too."

"But … why?" Marigold struggled against both Sophronia and the hot, irrational mixture of anger and fear making a fist of her throat. "It's just a garden! How could a garden ruin anything?"

It was beyond Marigold's powers of logic to make any sense out of the man, who continued ranting and pulling, kicking and uprooting—ruining everything, even as he accused her of the same. He was utterly maniacal.

"What is wrong with him?" she asked no one and everyone who had come out of the house to gawk—from a safe distance—at the sight.

But only Sophronia answered. "Nothing you could ever hope to cure."

There was a weary fatality in her voice that finally pierced Marigold's armor of positivity. "Why does he hate everyone so much?" The words were more plea than question. "Why does he hate me?"

Sophronia answered by wrapping her arm around Marigold's shoulder, and Marigold didn't know what astonished her more—the affection from her cousin, or the naked hatred from her cousin's husband.

"Let him be for now," Sophronia advised. "Let him rant and rave and have his way. And when he's done, we'll put it to rights, just like we always do. We'll carry on. Just like we always do."

It was something so uncharacteristically lucid and kind and practical that Marigold was astonished into acceptance. "Thank you."

Perhaps something good might be salvaged from the destruction—perhaps this would be the impetus to finally convince Sophronia to talk lucidly and directly about the wrong done to Marigold's mother. And then Marigold could go back to Boston and escape this ridiculous abuse—although frankly, there was nothing she might be due that could make up for what had just happened, no promise of atonement that could be worth enduring another such experience.

Ellery seemed to have finally exhausted himself uprooting plants and turned what was left of his spite on her. "I'll trouble you to mind your own business and not be insinuating yourself with my family. I've seen you working your wiles on Wilbert."

"Insinuating?" Marigold's courage rose in proportion to the threat. "Why, you miserable old troll! It's a wonder someone in this house hasn't put you to bed with a shovel! I was invited here, not the other way around—your family are the ones who intruded upon me."

"You're no family of mine!" Ellery roared loud enough for all of Great Misery and half of Massachusetts to hear. "You keep away from what's mine," he screeched, spittle flying from his mouth, "or so help me, I'll get rid of you with my own two—"

"That's enough, Pa." Somehow, Wilbert was stepping between then, physically shielding her from his father's unreasonable aggression.

"Bah." Ellery flung himself away from his son before he pointed one bony finger at her in accusation. The look in his eyes was like nothing Marigold had ever seen—a roiling hatred that defied all logic and reason. "You keep her away from my woods."

With that ominous warning, the horrid man stomped off, and Marigold was left standing among the ruins. "Rest assured," she murmured more to herself than anyone, "I wouldn't go near you or your woods again, even with all the thyme in the world."

But Sophronia was looking at her with the same sort of pleased wonder Wilbert had evinced when Marigold had given him his money. "Well, look at you," Sophronia finally said. "Not a bit mothlike."

"Naturally," Marigold rejoined. But whatever stubborn determination or pride had carried her through the encounter ebbed away, leaving her feeling empty and shaken and remembering the hirsute clerk's prediction that old man Hatchet was like to murder her .

The hatred that had shone in Ellery Hatchet's eyes was a weapon far more dangerous than Wilbert's scythe or Seviah's matches or even Daisy's gun. Ellery Hatchet's hatred had no logic.

It was no longer hard to understand that he could have perpetrated a great and godless wrong against her mother. And instead of righting the wrong, he seemed determined to perpetuate his wrong a second time. On her. And Marigold didn't think she had anything left to combat such evil.

Nor did anyone else, it seemed—Daisy only approached once her father had retreated from sight. "Pa's just like that," she consoled, before she led Marigold away. "But we haven't got much time. I saw Tad's catboat cross Black Rock a while back."

Marigold took a deep breath. She could not crumble now. She was the incomparable Miss Manners, and she needed to act like a New Woman and not some shivering damsel in unreasoning distress. For Daisy's sake if not her own.

She had only a moment to calm her emotions, splash her face with cold water from the pump, and check her appearance as best she might in the reflection of the kitchen window before she joined Daisy on the path to North Cove. One problem at a time—she would deal with the garden later.

Daisy, she was pleased and relieved to notice, was dressed exactly as they had agreed, in a borrowed, freshly ironed, modern shirtwaist and sweeping skirt that hid her worn—but now well-polished—boots. She positioned herself precisely where they had rehearsed, within hailing distance in the deep shade of the woods, so she could act as if she had come upon the visitors unknowingly.

"Good morning," Marigold called with forced cheer as the graceful catboat slid onto the sand of North Cove.

"Good morning, Marigold." Cab vaulted from the bow across the surf line with athletically practiced ease. "I apologize for being so early."

"Not a'tall." She shook Cab's outstretched hand and had to belatedly steel herself against the warmth and intimacy of her palm and fingers fitted against his. To inure herself against the impulse to throw herself into his arms, lay her head against his starch-scented shirtfront, and beg him to solve all her problems.

Cab took advantage of their proximity to say in a quiet voice, "I had to come early. My uncle was none too pleased with the idea of me delivering your goods out here. Tad had to sneak off to join me, so we can't stay long before he'll be missed."

It restored some of Marigold's equanimity to find that even golden boys like Cab and Tad had their familial troubles—perhaps some pumpkins came at a comparable price to being no-account . "Thank you for taking such trouble to bring me my bicycle."

Tad was already unloading the smaller crate of books. Marigold would have assisted him, but Cab stayed her with that instinctive way he had of finding the soft spot of skin on the inside of her arm. "Marigold? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she said automatically, before she could consider a better response. "I've just had a bit of a set-to with the overbearing paterfamilias, Ellery Hatchet. You know how families are," she quipped in an echo of his earlier words. "Nothing I can't handle."

But the truth hit her before she could finish the lie. The truth was that Ellery Hatchet's brand of distilled hatred was nothing she could handle, nothing she knew how to combat. Nothing she could change through her determined, practical tidying. Hatred of the kind that permeated the very earth of Hatchet Farm was well and truly beyond her scope.

It was going to take something far beyond cleaning and gardening.

Something she didn't know if she had in her to give.