Chapter 24

C HAPTER 24

We judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Her wire sent, Marigold tried to exercise her doubts and bolster her spirits by cutting a stylish picture as she pedaled back to the boat in time to catch the outgoing tide.

She had made progress on a number of fronts—though for others, not for herself. But progress was progress. Until it wasn't.

The moment Marigold remounted her bicycle on the twisting path through the island's woods, she was confronted by Ellery Hatchet himself. She debated keeping a safe distance, but he had already seen her—and Ellery Hatchet was a bully whose intimidation needed to be met head-on.

"Cousin Ellery." She greeted him coolly despite her hot palms.

"No cousin of yourn," he groused, looking askance at her bicycle. "What in thunderation is that infernal machine?"

"It is a bicycle," Marigold said, careful to keep both the machine and several yards of safe distance between them. She had no desire to goad him into another tirade, especially when no one else was there to keep him from physical violence.

He squinted his eyes in disapproval. "How in tarnation can that contraption stay upright if it can't balance on its own?"

Though Marigold was sure nothing she might say about the physics of propulsion would penetrate the wall of superstitious nonsense Ellery had built to keep out logic, her determined nature prompted her to try. "The chain drive exerts the force derived from the energy of my feet on the pedals to—"

"Serpentry, if you ask me. A menace, that thing is. As are you upon it. A heathen, no-account menace, showing your ankles."

As she had not asked him and was not showing any part of herself, clad in her well-polished bicycling boots, Marigold decided she might ignore his words the way he had ignored hers—though she would no longer ignore the fright she felt in his presence.

But gauging the distance between them gave her a narrow moment to observe that Ellery was dressed not in his usual grimy, soiled shirt and pants but in a rather cleaner, Sunday-go-to-meeting sort of suit. "You're all togged up, as Wilbert would say."

"I was to go preaching," he admitted. "Over to the Grange Hall, which lets the space every other Friday to meet and worship in the primitive faith, just as we ought."

Marigold did not want to enter into a discussion of faith—or lack thereof—but gauged it preferable to an investigation of where the boat that was to have taken him across to said Grange Hall might have been. "And how did your preaching go over?"

"Whatta you mean, go over?"

"I mean," Marigold explained, "how do your congregants like your sermons?"

"Didn't get to give it. The Lord saw fit to keep me from the water." He trudged unhappily up his side of the path. "But it doesn't matter what they like, they got to hear it. They got to understand they're sinners, every last lot of 'em, all iniquity and endless damnation. They're doomed to the fires of hell."

"So, in your belief, there is no room for redemption or forgiveness?"

"Only God can forgive. And only God will decide whether you're doomed or not. But we're camels before the eye of the needle, the Bible says. Doomed," he confirmed.

"I see." Marigold nodded politely, without any agreement. "And do you have a large congregation?"

His mouth turned down in sour admission. "I have a few."

"Less than ten?" she probed.

"Nyah." The word was a grumbled sound of neither admission nor defeat. "It's of no account. They're sinners whether they want to hear the word or not."

"I see," she said again, though at present she did not see—neither the point of Ellery's fruitless mission nor what she might do about it. "Perhaps your talents are wasted here," she added as a convenient sop to his pride, but the moment she said the words, the advertisement for the tent revival on the side wall of the druggist leapt into her mind's eye.

That same tingle of awareness she had felt that morning with Seviah resumed with a clamor—as if something within her had decided that Ellery needed her help as much as any other of the Hatchets—although she would be solving many of the others' problems too.

Can't ask you to clear out the place, can I?

"Have you ever thought of perhaps joining a tent revival to preach to a larger audience?" Marigold ventured. "I saw a waybill posted in Pride's Crossing about a religious revival taking place outside of Manchester—"

Hatchet made such a sound of derisive negation that she assumed he had no interest, but when they reached the barn, Ellery loomed close. "What was that tent whatsit you said?" he demanded. "What was it, now?"

Marigold instinctively stepped away to keep the threat that radiated off him like body odor at bay. "I believe the tent revival to be a traveling circuit of religious speakers," she said carefully, "who band together to take their message of faith to the people, wherever they might be, in this grand, expansive country of ours."

"And where did you say it was to be?"

"Manchester, Cousin Ellery."

"How many times I got to tell ye—you're no relation of mine!" But with that last piece of spite spent, Ellery Hatchet stomped away.

"Old man making friendly, was he?" Seviah teased from the ladder to the hayloft. "Wasting your breath with that one."

"Perhaps," Marigold agreed as the hectic pounding of her heart eased enough that she might be logical. "But I have better hopes for you."

The assignation with the "gramo"—and where had Seviah picked up slang like that?—did not commence until well after eleven o'clock at night, when the rest of the house had gone quiet and dark. Even Wilbert had finished off his writing exercises and taken himself off to his own room after refusing Marigold's whispered invitation to join them.

"That's not for me," he had said, shaking his head. "You already done me my good turn. You go on and do a turn for Daisy and Sev."

Accordingly, Marigold and Daisy tiptoed their silent way past Cleon, who was asleep, facedown upon the kitchen table. The thin moonlight was their only guide, but Daisy, who had clearly been sneaking out of the house for some time, knew her way and led Marigold unerringly through the darkened barn. "Sev?"

"Up here," Seviah's voice coaxed from high in the loft, but as Marigold clambered onto the bottom rung of the ladder, she could not shake the now-familiar, but nevertheless eerie, feeling that she was being watched.

She turned back to check the path behind, but there was no movement from the dark windows of the bleak house, no sound but the gentle lap of waves against the shore.

And yet the feeling persisted.

"Come on." Seviah broke the hold of Marigold's overactive imagination. "Up here."

When she emerged at the top of the ladder, Seviah's small safety lantern illuminated a makeshift room fashioned like a tent from canvas, burlap, and swags of circus-bright fabric—a surprisingly theatrical inner sanctum situated behind a wall made of thick bales of hay. Marigold's imaginings of her own excavation tent in Greece seemed decidedly drab in comparison.

"Boy howdy," was Daisy's exclamation of wonder.

Marigold settled for, "Seviah, I am all admiration." As well as all trepidation—it seemed an entirely flammable lair for a young man who liked to play with matches. The hay was old and so dry it crumbled to the touch.

"I fashioned it up pretty thick." Seviah patted a bale with more than a little pride. "With tarpaulins hung for walls and the door, so no light gets out and the sound gets muffled up." He lit a second shuttered safety lantern that illuminated the small square wooden box and large shellacked horn of the Berliner gramophone.

"I got rags and banjo music." He showed them his tidy collection of black rubberized recording disks. "And a turkey trot, a polka, a gavotte and a schottische, and two waltzes—the Belle of New York and the Aphrodite—for dancing. And songs, too, like they sing at the revues, like ‘The Girls I Left Behind.' All the hits."

There was something in his phrasing—and a giddy sort of excitement in his voice. And Marigold noted that he had a second separate stack of disks. She indulged her curiosity and sorted through a few more to find such titles as "New York Blues," "Model Minstrals," and "Isham's Octoroons," which Marigold knew were from Black vaudeville revues. And beneath the records was a tattered copy of the now defunct Musical Messenger , a Black cultural magazine.

You got the wrong idea , Lucy had said.

"So you play your gramophone and sing along, all alone, late at night, do you?"

Seviah's face went ruddy.

"The island isn't haunted, you bounder," Marigold accused on a laugh. "It's you"—and, she would bet every last cent of her one hundred dollars per annum, another, female singer—"sending out all those blues moans and groans!"

"It ain't all moans and groans!" he objected. "Blues music is all the go! And I'll have you know some folks think I got a dang pleasing voice."

"You do," Marigold conceded. "But all this must have cost you a small fortune, Seviah." Which was another very strange thing in a family where no one seemed to earn any ready money.

The young man tossed up that aggressive Hatchet shrug. "I got ways, so's I don't have to steal eggs like Wilbert."

Marigold had to smile—clearly many secrets weren't nearly as secret as anyone at Hatchet Farm thought. And tonight she felt closer than ever to one of Seviah's. But she already had a task at hand. "What dance steps do you already know?"

Seviah was once again all eagerness. "I know a two-step—long, long, short, short—and I know the one-two-three of the waltz, but I can't do the turns and swoops like they do on the nickelodeon reels."

So Seviah had sneaked off island to the nickelodeon parlor to watch their continuous reels. No wonder Hatchet Farm was in such a dilapidated state, with Ellery wandering about with his shovel and Seviah gone to watch vaudeville revues. Each to fend for themselves.

But she might make use of the information yet. "If you'll show us how to crank the spindle? Daisy, would you crank first, while your brother and I start on a beginner box step?"

Marigold took her stance with her arms out, bracing herself for Seviah to say something inappropriate or insinuating as they stepped together to dance. But he surprised her by being all stern concentration and gentlemanly civility. So much so that she could give herself over to the pleasure of the dance and teaching.

And so they were off, taking turns cranking the Berliner, box-stepping, turkey-trotting, and waltzing until nearly two in the morning, when Daisy's eyes began to droop. "That's enough for one night."

They left Seviah to bed down in his Scheherazade's cave and made their drowsy way back to the house. Marigold was extra cautious as they let themselves in the same way they had gone out, by the unlatched kitchen door, but Cleon was snoring at such a volume as to drown out any potential footfalls they might make.

"Good night, Marigold. And thank you," Daisy whispered before she enveloped Marigold in a quick hug. "I don't know when I've ever been so happy. Or hopeful."

"I'm glad." She parted ways with Daisy, but before she could make her way down the narrow, canting corridor to her loft room, the sharp clatter of crockery stopped her. "Cleon?"

"Nay." It was Sophronia, seeming to appear at the far end of the table as if she had conjured herself out of thin air. She had inverted her teacup against the saucer and was now peering hard at the dregs.

The sight of her—all ghostly, gray flowing hair and hooded eyes—made Marigold's skin prickle with uneasiness, even as she tried to remind herself that the last time they had spoken, Sophronia had comforted her.

"You'll want to be careful in the dark of night, Esmie's girl," the woman said out of the dimness. "Careful what you do. And who you trust."

Marigold forced her courage to rise with this new, frankly frightening attempt to intimidate her. "Thank you, Sophronia. I am well aware that I am not entirely welcome here and will continue to take care."

"You won't be able to stop what's coming, no matter what you do." Sophronia turned the cup in her hand. "The leaves say the same. Same as the cards." She shifted her gaze to a set of colorful picture cards laid out before her. "Same as they always have." She tapped her finger against a brightly colored card of a majestically seated woman brandishing a sword. "That's you. Always has been. Same every time."

Despite the eerie chill her cousin's words sent skittering across her skin, Marigold stepped closer, determined not to let Sophronia scare her with her fortune-telling doom and gloom. "Tarot and tea leaves? Really, Cousin. This is the end of the nineteenth century and not the Middle Ages. I have far more faith in my own logic and determination than in the vagaries of inanimate objects which are only invested with your desires, not mine. So the question here is not whether I should believe you but why you clearly wish some terrible experience to befall me. Why, Sophronia, why? Why try to scare the wits out of me at two o'clock in the morning instead of talking to me like a reasonable, rational human being during the light of day? What is your intent?"

"I've said what I've said—"

"—and you'll say no more." Marigold stood back and crossed her arms over her chest. "So you've said, several times. And yet you persist in dropping these eerie little bon mots at all hours of the night and day. Why?"

Sophronia's answer was a thin whisper. "Because I don't know what else to do."

Marigold refused to be disarmed. "What to do about what?"

Sophronia's gaze went shiny and soft before a single tear slipped down her cheek. "About all the years gone. All the evil done before."

"My dear cousin." Despite herself, Marigold was filled with a weary sort of pity. "I know I said the past was not a package one could lay away, but neither must one tote it about endlessly like a heavy suitcase."

"No, no." Sophronia shook her head. "You don't understand."

"No, I don't," Marigold agreed. "And you are the only one who can help me to understand. So why won't you?"

"I—" Sophronia stopped and started and, in the end, only pushed a single card toward Marigold. "The Hanged Man."

The card in question looked hand drawn in pen and ink with watercolors, depicting a bound man hanging by his feet from a scaffold.

Despite the fright and revulsion that gripped her, Marigold made her tone cold. "And what do you suggest this upside-down fool means to me, Cousin?"

This time Sophronia laid her cold hand over Marigold's. "There is a painful sacrifice waiting here, Esmie's girl." She fingered the card. "Wisdom that comes at a cost."

"And what is that cost?"

Sophronia finally looked away. "Something I fear none of us can afford to pay."