Chapter 32

C HAPTER 32

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the

most important.

—Arthur Conan Doyle

The next day was the most tranquil Marigold had ever spent at Hatchet Farm. Ellery was gone to Manchester and the Reverend Cooper at dawn, rowed away by a jubilant Wilbert.

Seviah had gone as well, sailing off in a canoe he had kept hidden on the southwestern end of the island—the means for secret trips to the theater and nickelodeon parlor revealed—anxious to make his appointment with Mr. Keith at Pride's Crossing's small opera house.

Daisy was packing her bags—which were, in actuality, Marigold's valises and trunks, as Daisy had never before had the opportunity for travel—for a visit to Rock Ledge, where she had been invited for a get-to-know-you stay by her future mother-in-law, who was very smartly trying to ease the antagonism between her husband and son that had arisen as a result of the latter's engagement.

Which left Great-Aunt Alva fuming in her room, audibly muttering on about the danger of boats, while Sophronia joined Wilbert and Marigold in quiet repose in the breezeway.

"It sure was a right good thing that you came, Cousin Marigold," Wilbert mused. "Because of you, everything's changed."

Marigold certainly felt her own share of contentment in knowing she had done well by her cousins. But while she might be forgiven some small private pride in her accomplishments, pride inevitably went before a fall. "Not because of me, Wilbert. You said so yourself last night—you all made your own decisions. All I did was help you find the information and means to make those decisions."

"I reckon you'll be gone soon too, same as Daisy." His tone was surprisingly wistful.

"I'm not going anywhere yet, Wilbert." Not until she saw them all settled in their new roles. With Ellery gone, she might stay as long as she wished now. The problem was in knowing what exactly she wished for—besides learning what great and godless wrong had been done to her late, beloved mother.

"I suppose that Harvard fellow's going to come calling?"

If Marigold had indeed expected Cab Cox to come calling that morning, she had been very much mistaken. She quashed her unreasonable disappointment with a stringent application of rationality. "You suppose wrong, Wilbert. Mr. Cox knows I have no interest in marriage."

"Way he looked at you last night …" Wilbert shook his head like a hound. "Like he's not the kind of fellow who's used to taking no for an answer."

"I assure you, Mr. Cox is a gentleman who is well able to take no for an answer."

"You'd really say no to a fellow like him?"

"I would." Despite her attraction to Cab, her feelings on the subject of marriage remained quite strict.

Wilbert's sigh was just heartfelt enough to be alarming. "Well, I guess now I won't feel so bad." He turned his attention to the problems at hand. "With Lucy gone, Granny will be fit to be tied over the food. Wonder if she left any foodstuffs behind?"

"Why don't I take a look in Lucy's root cellar," Marigold offered. She doubted Lucy would have had time to remove all of the canned and dried goods she had stored before she sailed to the mainland last night.

But the bulkhead latch was locked. Marigold would have gone to the door, or at the very least peered in the small windows—she had always been curious to see the inside of the place—when Bessie Dove emerged from it, walking purposefully toward the breezeway at the back of the house.

Bessie Dove, who had sworn to never set foot upon Great Misery again, was approaching Sophronia, who stood warily.

Marigold stepped back into the shade of Lucy's cabin to watch and listen.

"You know we got to talk," Bessie began.

"Ayuh," Sophronia was agreeing in her odd New England way. "After well on twenty years, I suppose we were due."

"Is he gone for good, do you think?" Bessie asked.

Sophronia almost smiled. "A body can only hope."

"And your boy Seviah?"

Sophronia's countenance seemed to cloud. "Gone with some theater fellow he talked about. Said he weren't coming back."

"He's got Lucy thinking the same," Bessie accused, "talking about striking out on her own. Which is all fine and good, but I can't like this closeness between my girl and your boy. He was at my house this morning, talking to her all secret-like, the two of them thick as thieves." Bessie put her hands on her hips. "Now, your man—"

"He's not my man," Sophronia broke in. "Never really was. Bound to follow no counsel or course but his own." She looked Bessie in the eye. "But you, of all people, knew long before me what he's like."

Bessie responded, almost too quietly for Marigold to hear, "I prayed he was done with that, for your sake."

"He was not." Sophronia's admission came on a sigh. "He always took what he wanted without so much as a by-your-leave from another soul." She drew in a long breath, as if she could draw strength or solace from the sweetening spring air. "He didn't ever belong to anybody except himself. And Mother Hatchet."

"That one," was Bessie's dismissal of the old beldam before she pressed her original point. "Now, I don't have nothing against your boy personally, but you know we can't let them think—"

"He is my boy," Sophronia confirmed quietly. "But he's not Hatchet's."

Marigold felt as if the blood had stopped in her veins—her skin went all hot and prickly and she had to put a hand across her mouth to keep from making another sound. But she must have made some noise, because the two women's heads swiveled toward where she hid. And then Bessie took Sophronia's elbow and urged her into the garden, on the other side of the runner bean frames—well out of earshot, damn it.

And although Marigold had strict feelings about eavesdropping, she had never been so tempted to break all her hard-and-fast standards of conduct as she was now. "Damnation." Marigold gave in to her vexation.

"That you, Marigold?" Lucy emerged from under the bulkhead door. "I thought I heard someone at the latch. What you doing here?"

"I was just coming to ask you about …" Marigold stuck as close to the truth as she dared. "About purchasing some of the canned and dried goods you might not want to transport back to the mainland."

"Oh, sure." Lucy frowned even as she agreed. "I'll set some things out for you." But she carefully reset the padlock on the outside of the cellar door.

Still so many locks. "Thank you."

"I was just about to clean out my stuff from the loft," Lucy said. "Care to help me?"

"Seviah's loft?" Marigold responded, more from curiosity than anything else.

"Our loft."

Marigold allowed herself the small pleasure of vindication before she followed Lucy up the ladder. Without the lamps, the loft at the top of the barn was dim and unlit and … empty. The colorful shawls and swaths of fabric that had decorated the walls were gone. The precious gramophone had been taken away, as had most of the rubber record disks—a scattered few were stacked in a cardboard tray, too numerous, she guessed, for Seviah to have packed in his hasty departure.

"I was just coming back for those." Lucy shrugged a leather satchel off her shoulder.

"These are yours, then?" Marigold started to collect the disks. "Are you going for good, then, too?"

"Everything has its season—that's what scripture says, anyway. And the season for my time on Great Misery has come to an end. But that's the way of it, isn't it?" Lucy laughed. "My momma used to say that when you find how you want to spend the rest of your life, you want that rest of your life to start right away."

"And is Seviah to be a part of that life?" Marigold asked cautiously.

"Sev?" Lucy's smile somehow widened. "You're just like my momma—she's got some worm eating at her brain that I'm all romantical about Seviah, but it's not like that between him and me. It was just being friendly, playing music, me teaching him about the blues and all. Him helping me with other things. Finding some small way to be happy."

Let that be a lesson to Marigold for jumping to unwarranted conclusions. "I had a hunch it was you two, together, singing and playing music late into the night, and not a haunted house at all."

"Oh, yeah!" Lucy's smile seemed to light the dim interior. "That was our secret, him and me. Treated me right," she averred with quiet conviction. "He helped me, so I helped him—helped us both to something better."

And here Marigold had thought she was the one who had put ideas of something better into her cousin's head.

Lucy put the disks into the satchel. "Sev couldn't afford much himself, what with old Ellery not paying them wages."

"But you got paid?" So strangely inconsistent, these quarrelsome, miserly Hatchets.

"Every week, in advance," Lucy confirmed. "Saturday morning, on the tray, in actual."

"Alva paid you herself?" What had Cleon, or was it Wilbert, said about the egg money? Likes to know where every penny has gone.

Lucy shrugged. "Don't know who else would have any money—no one else on this rock ever had more than a few cents to rub together before you came along. But I'm glad you did. Because things are different now, and that's a real good thing."

"Then I'm glad I came too." Marigold's smile felt bittersweet—to think she had made such friends only when she was losing them. "What will you do now?"

"Well …" Lucy hesitated a long moment before she made up her mind. "I've got this idea for a book on cookery. I've been working on my recipes, just getting them down exactly right, trying the tricky ones out on Seviah and then you, this last bit, before I served them to old Mrs. Hatchet—that's how he helped me before you came, tasting everything. So, if he liked it and then old Mrs. Hatchet liked it—because she hates everything—I knew my recipe was good."

"Excellent." Marigold heartily approved. "A book of recipes and instruction that could teach even me to cook?"

"Maybe not you," Lucy laughed. "It's meant to be for professional cooks, who cook for others." She fished a sheaf of papers out of her satchel and handed them to Marigold, who moved closer to the loft's hay door and the light.

"Why, Lucy!" Marigold's voice was full of admiration. "Your handwriting is exquisite."

"So? I told you I went to a free school in Salem."

"A careful hand shows a careful mind. And this is meticulous, so I am quite sure without tasting this particular beef burgoo that it will be delicious."

"So, you think my idea could work?"

"Naturally! I will immediately make inquiries amongst my friends as to how to go about doing just that." Isabella would know somebody in publishing—she knew everybody. And young Thaddeus Endicott, who was about to launch a fashionable magazine, was likely to know whose door Lucy might knock upon. "We will make your plan a reality, Lucy. See if we don't."

"You'd help me?" Lucy's smile was all the thanks Marigold might need.

"Naturally! And as much as I hate to see you go, I know it will be for the best." Marigold was surprised by her own sentiment. "You must do what you're meant to do and let the world learn to catch up. Now, before I weep like a maiden auntie …" Marigold held out her hand to shake, but to her surprise—and delight—Lucy pulled her into a quick but heartfelt hug.

"I'm going to miss you, all improving like you are and everything," Lucy said as she stepped back. "And I'm going to remember you, too, when things need improving—how small things, like washing the clothes and picking up that junk, started to change everything."

"Thank you, Lucy. I'll remember you too. Especially when you're a famous chef and author. I'll be telling everyone, ‘I knew her back when!' You and Seviah both."

"You do that, Miss Big City Manners," Lucy teased. "Well." She straightened her clothes. "You stay in touch."

"Naturally. Until then, goodbye and good luck!" Marigold called as she waved Lucy down the ladder. But Marigold didn't follow. Instead, she found a bale of hay near the open loft window and sat for a quiet moment to think.

Because what Sophronia had said to Bessie Dove to stop the worm of worry in her brain was that Seviah was not Ellery's son. Which meant that Bessie had been worried that he was. Because when had she thought that Seviah was Ellery's son, he was unfit for Lucy's company?

Which meant either that whatever had happened between Ellery Hatchet and Bessie Dove in the past was so awful that she was carrying a grudge … or that the grudge she had carried might actually be Lucy.

Seviah Hatchet might not be Ellery Hatchet's child, but Marigold would bet all her accomplishments to date that Lucy Dove was.