Chapter 31

C HAPTER 31

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no

other way.

—Mark Twain

Inside her pocket, Marigold's hand clutched at her own gun, even as she was both astonished and thrilled to find she hadn't trained all the brash independence from Daisy's character. Across the room, even Wilbert gaped at Daisy.

"You wouldn't dare!" her father thundered.

"Try me," the girl answered with calm determination. "I've had about all I'm prepared to take. After all these years of your abuse," she swore, "don't think I wouldn't mind using you for target practice. Maybe I won't bother to shoot your eye out." She let her arm drop slightly. "I'll aim lower."

Ellery obligingly blanched, but Great-Aunt Alva clutched her chest as if she were suffering an apoplexy. "No, no! We'll go on like we did before. We'll return to the old ways."

"And what ways are those?" Marigold asked with all the unperturbed logic she could muster. "When an innocent girl could be forced into an arranged marriage?"

Great-Aunt Alva ignored Marigold's question, wilting into a tearful puddle of damp nightgown. "How could this happen?" she wailed piteously at her granddaughter. "How could you leave me? How could you abandon me?"

Daisy rose to her moment. She spoke with absolute conviction. "I am my own woman, Granny, and I can decide for myself. And I chose love. I'm going to marry Tad Endicott if it's the last thing I do on this green earth, because I love him and he loves me and we're getting married and that's an end to it."

"But I forbid it," Alva insisted on a sob.

But the assembly was diverted from Alva's theatrics in favor of Seviah's—he shook off his indolent pose and stood as if he were in command of a stage. "I'm leaving too. If Daisy is leaving this godforsaken place for the life she was meant to have, so can I!"

"No!" Sophronia's objection was no more than a whisper, but she reached for her son. "Seviah! Not you."

"Yes, me!" he declared. "I'm tired of your doom and gloom and tea leaves and tarot. I'm tired of this rotten old place and of working for nothing. There's nothing for me here, so I've got nothing to lose. I've got a chance and I'm going to take it."

"A chance?" Sophronia cried. "But where will you go? What will you do?"

"What I was born to do." Seviah struck a dramatic pose that would doubtless soon be filling matinees and evenings alike. "I'm going upon the stage! The famous Mr. Benjamin Franklin Keith himself has asked me to join his traveling revue. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to be a vaudeville star, and there's nothing any of you can say that could stop me."

"If you go," Ellery threatened, "you'll get nothing from me."

"Ain't never got nothing from you worth having," Seviah scoffed. "Never paid me a wage. Never paid me so much as a kind word."

"You never deserved one!" his father bellowed. "And what's more, you sniveling ba—"

"Ellery! I won't have this. I won't." Alva had recovered herself enough to thump her cane to get their attention. "No one is to leave Great Misery Island."

"Not if they ain't in a casket," Cleon muttered sympathetically.

"I am leaving!" Seviah said with defiance. "I'm leaving on my own two feet right this minute, even if I have to swim across the sound. That Mr. Keith said as he would send his launch for me, but I didn't want him to see what a pitiful bag o' nails this place is. I didn't want him to pity or be ashamed of me, the way I am of you."

"Ashamed?" Ellery Hatchet's voice rose to a mean snarl. "I've never been anything but ashamed of you . You and your—"

"Seviah, I forbid you!" Alva gripped her cane so tightly her swollen knuckles shone white as bones against the handle. "You'll be cursed—"

"I'm cursed if I stay," Seviah returned. "Cursed by him"—he jabbed a finger at his father—"every blame day of my life no matter what I do. I've had enough. I'm leaving." He turned to his sister. "I'm going now—Daisy, if you want, I'll take you back with me."

"Yes!" she answered.

"Why, you ungrateful, unchristian succubi," Ellery fumed at his children. "I should have drowned you—drowned the whole lot of you! Ungrateful, unholy—"

"What will be will be, Ellery Hatchet." Sophronia stopped his rant with her quiet interjection. "You know that sure as you know anything."

"So you keep telling me, damn your witchy eyes." Ellery rose to his gaunt height. "Years and years of toil I've given, laboring under your curses—both of you!" He stabbed his fingers at both his mother and his wife. "The things I've done for this family. But no more. I'll not labor another minute for you ungrateful wretches. By God, I'm going too! I've made up my mind. I'm going to join the Revered Edison P. Cooper and his religious tent revival at Manchester. I'm dedicating my life to the good Lord from here on out, and I'll never think of you or this cursed island ever again."

And then, in the way of things, the evening really went downhill from there.

Alva screamed. Sophronia sank down into a chair in wonder. Daisy gripped Marigold's hand tighter than ever. Only Wilbert seemed to take the announcement in stride. "Well, I'll be doggoned. If that don't just seem like the fittest thing for you, Pa, I don't know what is."

"I forbid it, do you hear?" Alva cawed. "I forbid you!"

For a moment Ellery wavered under her piteous stare, but them he seemed to throw off her spell. "Mother, you have no hold on me now. I belong to no one but the Lord."

"You belong to me and this island," Alva insisted. "You promised," she cried. "You promised me."

"I'm done with the past," Ellery declared. "Done, I tell you. I'll go and take nothing but my Bible."

"You won't go. You dare not," the tiny old woman insisted. "You"—she turned on Sophronia—"you tell your husband he needs to stay. He belongs here. He belongs to us, here."

"Oh, nay," Sophronia disagreed with a wondrous sort of serenity. "He's none of mine. Hasn't belonged to me for years and years, nor I him. Best for him to follow his own way. What will be will be."

"I'll row you across myself, Pa," Wilbert declared. "If we go now, we can catch the tide."

"Have you all lost your senses?" Alva Hatchet asked everyone and no one in particular. "Don't you dare get in a boat." She seemed genuinely bereft, panting for air with her hand across her chest, as if she were having heart palpitations. "You know the danger of crossing—"

"I've broken the curse and the chains you've bound around me, Mother," Ellery said with an eye-rolling sort of wonder. "As sure as the dawn is rising upon us, I'll look to the new day and a new life. I'll go with God and pray that he has mercy upon your wretched souls."

He strode out of the room, deaf to his mother's wailing—which found a new target.

"This is all your doing," she cried. "You're the slommack who came to disrupt our ways." Alva stabbed the air in front of Marigold's chest with her cane as if she would lance Marigold like a boil. "You put all this nonsense in their heads, and you're to take it back out. They listened to me—they obeyed me before you came."

As Marigold had indeed quite purposefully helped both Wilbert and Daisy, encouraged Seviah, and told Ellery about the tent revival—and was frankly extraordinarily pleased at the result—she decided discretion was the better part of valor.

She kept her mouth shut. There would be time enough to savor her triumphs later. One never wanted to make too much of oneself.

But Sophronia found her voice. "I've told you again and again, Mother Hatchet, what will be will be. There's no way you can stop it, no matter who you blame."

"This is your doing too." Alva turned on her daughter-in-law. "You could have prevented this if you'd been any sort of decent wife."

"Would have needed a decent sort of husband," Sophronia returned reasonably, almost smiling at the sight of her tiny mother-in-law quivering with impotent rage.

In fact, the old woman looked so like a female Rumpelstiltskin that Marigold instinctively drew herself and Daisy back, lest the old lady go up in a flash of angry smoke.

But the movement brought Alva's attention back to her granddaughter. "How could you let yourself be led astray by one such as her?" she asked Daisy in a last-ditch plea choked with tears. "You were raised to be an unspoiled, natural, biddable creature, and you've turned into this … this …" She sputtered to find a word bad enough.

"This elegant, self-possessed young woman?" Marigold finished for her.

"Thank you, Marigold," Daisy said, before she addressed her grandmother again. "Marigold didn't lead me astray, Granny. She helped me find my way—the way I wanted for myself. The same way she did for Will and Sev, and even Pa, if I had to guess. She showed us that what we wanted for ourselves was possible." Daisy turned back to Marigold. "And I, for one, can never thank her enough."

"That's right," said Wilbert. "We each made our own decisions and followed our own conscience. Nobody can say we didn't."

Marigold found herself besieged by emotion. Darling wretches, defending her like that. She was uncommonly, unforgivably proud of all of them. "Thank you," she said when she found her voice. "And on that note, I should think the account is full and done, and I, for one, am for bed. It's been a very long but very fruitful day."

Marigold took Daisy's hand, and by silent consent, they went together up to Daisy's room.

But not before they heard Sophronia say with a sort of gleeful wonder, "Definitely not the same length as all the others."