Chapter 4

C HAPTER 4

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

—Mark Twain

The peonies had wilted by the time the train steamed to her destination.

"Pride's Station!" the conductor bawled. "All out for Pride's Crossing."

Marigold rose, but found the aisle blocked.

"Well, how do you do, missy!" A bearded, middle-aged man poked the brim of his bowler hat upward in greeting. "Don't you look pretty as a pick-chah," he drawled in his countrified, New England way. "Look just like one of those Gibson Girls come to life."

Marigold felt the uneasy mixture of wariness and mistrust that was so unfortunately well-known to women traveling alone. She knew she was meant to be flattered—Mr. Gibson's drawings of the female archetype of the age were all the rage—but when the fellow's hairy smile slid into a leer, unease became umbrage. Nothing brought out the intrusive familiarity and condescending littleness in men of all ages like an independent, unaccompanied young woman.

"Lonely country for such a delicate-lookin' little lady," was his next gambit. He might as well have twirled his over-oiled mustache as a substitute for announcing his intentions.

Though Marigold might appear delicate to him, at the moment she had the finer feelings of a catamount. She was a modern New Woman and would not be frightened into politeness. "Let me pass, sir. I have no wish for your, or any other, company."

"Hey, now." His toothy grin was all condescending smarm. "That any way to treat a fellow who's just trying to be friendly?"

Marigold gave the fellow her crocodile smile. "No," she agreed pleasantly. "This is." And with that, she all but harpooned him with the business end of her stylish but steel-shanked umbrella.

"Hey, now!" he yelped as he jackrabbited out of her reach. "If you ain't just the harpiest thing." But he rubbed his abused, well-padded posterior from a distance of proper respect.

"Quite so," she agreed with the same cold-blooded smile. "And I should like nothing more than to demonstrate my harpiest prowess." Her coursework in physical education at Wellesley had been comprehensive, including a vast deal of self-defense. "If you do not clear the way immediately, I will feel free to do you a more deliberate harm."

The fellow obligingly fled the car.

Marigold allowed herself a moment of triumph. But only a moment. Because the station platform was empty of any person who might be taken for a greeting relative, though she had wired her expected time of arrival. The efficient parlor car porter had expertly managed the transfer of her stack of trunks to the platform, but the step down to the rustic stick-and-shingle-style station was where all such luxuries ended—the velvet couches, plush banquettes, and silver flatware of the parlor car gave way to the bare wooden benches of the lone station wagon for hire idling in the lane.

Still, Marigold was made of sterner stuff than to wilt at the prospect of minor physical discomfort—indeed, she had long looked forward to the physical as well as mental challenges of archaeological fieldwork. She fancied she would have met with similar conditions transporting her baggage to the Greek islands, although the temperature in New England was a vast deal rawer than what she imagined Kefalonia would have offered.

"My good man," she called to the gray-haired driver, "I desire a wagon to the pier for Great Misery Island." Since her cousin had not met her at the station, surely she would be awaiting Marigold at the pier, where a sleek, awning-covered motor launch would no doubt ferry them out.

"Great Mis'ry?" The spindly man's bristly chin slowly telescoped into his neck, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell in consternation. "Cain't get there from here."

" I am going there from here." Marigold's rejoinder was firm. "You have only to tell me how."

"No pier is what I mean to say, miss." He touched his hat in a belated gesture of respect. "Tho I s'pose I could get you as far as the beach."

That would have to suffice. "Thank you. And a porter to assist with my baggage?"

"There's a dolly 'round the side," was all he offered.

"Naturally." Marigold fetched said dolly—a squeaky hand truck with wobbly wooden wheels that looked in imminent danger of splintering—and managed by a great deal of athletic exertion to load her various smaller cases into the well of the station wagon, glad of her decision to wear her healthful, elasticized sporting corset. "I shall require your assistance, sir, with these heavier trunks."

"By jeezum." The driver let out a low whistle. "Cain't fit all that, miss. Reckon we might take them trunks, seeing as you're strong enough, but them big crates'll need to go on another wagon."

Her books and her bicycle! But this was merely a setback and not insurmountable. "And how does one arrange for a second vehicle?" She cast a glance at the empty lane.

The miscreant raked his fingers through his whiskers. "Reckon I could come back and fetch them along. For another full fare."

"Naturally." It was damnably remarkable how often the sight of a calm, confident, independent woman brought out the littleness in any man, even one who resembled a turtle.

Marigold controlled both her ire and her tongue. "Miss Marigold Manners, Hatchet Farm, Great Misery Island. Payment in cash upon delivery. I leave it"—she gave him both her bluster-proof smile and her calling card—"in your capable hands. Thank you."

He gaped at her as if she had eaten her wide-brimmed hat. Speaking of which—the weather along the coast was turning rawer by the minute. Rain looked imminent.

Marigold opened her carpeted handbag and shook out the long, heavy duster Isabella had tailored to her requirements, along with a veil for her hat and a pair of protective safety goggles she had packed to shelter her complexion.

There was no excuse for looking unfashionable or being unprepared, no matter the raw occasion. Or the raw audience. "If that don't beat all," the driver drawled.

"I hope it does." Marigold was not a collegiate athletic champion and a New Woman for nothing. She scaled the rudimentary step up to the well of the cart with ease and settled onto a precarious perch atop her luggage as serenely if it were a padded deck chair on a luxury liner and not an overloaded station wagon.

Yet the moment the vehicle was bawled into motion, serenity was thrown to the wind—it was everything she could do to hang on as the horse tore down the narrow, rutted lanes at a rattletrap pace.

She loosened her hold on the seat rail only long enough to button the collar of her heavy duster against the cutting cold of the April wind off the Atlantic as the wagon wound its shuddering way toward the water. Salem Sound appeared at the end of the lane, gray, tumbling, and foaming as it rushed against the shore, breathtakingly beautiful in a relentless, almost overwhelming sort of way.

"Is that the island?" she asked of the small, manicured landmass just offshore.

"Naah, miss," the driver tossed over his shoulder. "That's Chubb. Mis'ry's larger, farther out." He cast her a long look as he reined the cart to a halt. "Beg pardon, miss, but what in gumption do you want with Great Mis'ry?"

"I'm visiting my relations, the Hatchet family, there."

He gawked at her. "On purpose?"

Marigold was taken aback but refused to give in to the feeling of creeping unease. "Naturally."

"By jeezum." He scratched his grizzled chin. "If that don't beat all. Cain't for the life of me think of why any decent lady would want to do that."

"Whyever not?"

"Things ain't right with them folk," he swore. "You mark my words, miss, afore it's too late—them Hatchets out to Great Mis'ry just ain't right."

Marigold was having none of his gloomy, Gothic predictions. "Nonsense," she said as firmly as possible while attempting to descend from her rickety seat. "The Hatchets are my family, and I'll brook none of that talk about them, if you please."

"Cain't say as I didn't warn you," the bewhiskered driver muttered, tossing his beard at a derelict dory drawn up some distance away on the otherwise empty beach. "There's for Great Mis'ry, I reckon, if you're dead set on going. Cain't think why else old Cleon'd be here—besides the obvious."

The obvious was not apparent to Marigold. "Am I to understand that boat to be my transport to the island?" The vision of the fashionable motor launch sank from her imagination as the specter of the primitive rose.

"Ayuh," the fellow confirmed in his New England way. "If old Cleon ain't all womble croft—halfway to Concord," he clarified.

"I see," she said, though she did not, in fact, understand his garbled reference. Of this Cleon she saw no sign. But the chill afternoon was rapidly fading into chillier twilight, so Marigold turned her collar against the relentlessly raw April wind and wrestled her baggage into a pile where she could keep an eye on it before she approached the dory—which appeared empty but for a heap of stained, stinking fishing nets.

Marigold had half climbed in to bail out the briny bilge water collected in the bottom when the ragged heap of net she had kicked aside roared to life.

"Lawd, help me from being murdered!" the heap cried.

Marigold managed to keep both her footing and her composure only by the slimmest of margins—and by grabbing hold of the thin gunwale. "Control yourself, sir," she advised in her sternest tones, while attempting to impose the exact some control over her wildly beating heart. "You are not in the least being murdered."

The man to whom she spoke was a specimen so straight out of Mark Twain's imagination—all wide, pale eyes and ruddy, windburnt face, with uneven tufts of white hair sticking straight out of his head at all angles—that he could only be termed a codger . Between the ogler on the train, the turtle of a driver, and now this addled old coot, Marigold felt as if she had somehow fallen into one of Mr. Twain's novels as revenge for calling the author a savage.

When the old fellow subsided into a heap on the cross bench, Marigold drew a calmer breath. "Kindly explain yourself, sir."

The dung heap of a man looked up at her with rheumy gray eyes. "I be Cleon."

"Naturally." She tried to smile in an encouraging way and soften her voice, the way one did when soothing a stray dog. "From Great Misery Island?"

"Ayuh." He squinted up at her. "Be you Esmie's girl?"

She corrected his pronunciation of her mother's name. "Esm é Sedgwick Manners was my mother, yes." Marigold unwound the enveloping veil from her hat and removed her goggles so he might better see her. "I am her daughter, Marigold Manners. How do you do."

"That's a-right, then." He nodded in apparent relief. "I'm to get poor Esmie's girl."

"Then you've got her." Now that introductions had been sorted, it was time to return to practicalities. "I would appreciate some help with my baggage. The larger trunk is far too heavy for me to lift alone."

"I don't know 'bout no baggages." Cleon rolled his way over the side of the dory and staggered to his feet. "I'm only to get poor Esmie's girl."

"Esm é 's girl comes with luggage, which you see arrayed behind you," Marigold explained with some exasperation. "I should like the trunks arranged carefully, to take care not to lose them overboard." The farther she traveled, the more she was coming to realize that some of the things in her possession were now quite irreplaceable.

"Lawd, where we gonna put 'em?" he wondered aloud.

While Marigold could not expect the efficient expertise of the parlor car porters from such an addlepated codger, she had strict opinions about incompetence. "In this capacious dory," she instructed with precision and far more patience—or confidence—than she felt. "I'll show you exactly how I should like them stowed."

But in the process of loading, it became apparent that the old man's state of befuddlement was at least in part due to a recent overindulgence in intoxicating spirits—he reeked equally of fish scales and strong rye whiskey. Halfway to Concord explained.

"I'll row, if you please." Marigold climbed aboard the dory and rewrapped her veil to protect her complexion against the incessant wind before she squared the oars. "You may push us off."

Cleon complied with a gusty amount of huffing, puffing, and groaning, but once the vessel was finally afloat, he sloshed aboard and slumped himself into a rumple in the stern. "Don't look much like poor li'l Esmie. Bigger n' darker," he opined.

Marigold was a brunette where her mother had been blonde, athletically built where her mother had been delicately boned. "How did you know my mother?"

"Seen a picture Miz Sophronia—my cousin Hatchet's missus—keeps of her. Our Daisy's the spit of her."

Marigold tacked that information onto its proper leaf on her sprawling family tree—Cleon was from the opposite branch of her cousin Sophronia's family and no actual relation of Marigold's. "And Daisy is your daughter?"

"Oh, nay. Miz Sophronia's."

"Ah, then I suppose Daisy is my"—Marigold did the requisite assorting of generations in her head—"second cousin."

Cleon agreed. "Must be on account they look so like."

Marigold attempted to sort Cleon's ambiguities out. "My mother and Cousin Sophronia, or her daughter Daisy?"

"Oh, you'll see," Cleon said with a shiver. "You'll surely see. Bad blood atwixt 'em," he averred. "Nothing but bad blood atween the whole bedamned lot."