Chapter 6

C HAPTER 6

My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.

—Jane Austen

Marigold shook off the frisson of fear that laddered up her spine. Fear meant she was relinquishing logic, the very bedrock of her carefully educated persona. She would not give in to the clutches of illogic. She refused its tawdry invitation.

In the fitful, eerily marbled light cast by the oil lamp, Marigold could see that her mother's cousin must have once been a handsome woman—there were traces of the Sedgwick family nose and delicate bone structure—but years of hardscrabble living had taken their toll. The woman resembled nothing so much as a cracked walnut shell, worn and wrinkled on the outside, jagged and hollow beneath.

Marigold would take care not to get scratched.

Presently, they came out of the creaking hallway into a large, ill-lit kitchen, redolent with the pungent, greasy smells of kerosene and bacon fat. The room had once been the old-fashioned keeping room typical of New England farmhouses, with a long-board table with chairs and benches in the center and a cavernous fireplace that now housed a hulking cast-iron stove.

"You've come all aback for supper," Sophronia advised her.

"I am sorry for that," Marigold said, trying to understand her cousin's peculiar vernacular, though the dirty dishes littered across the table gave no clue as to what sort of foodstuffs she was too late to be offered. "Would it be possible to get a plate of bread and butter in my room? Or perhaps some hot tea and milk? It has been a rather long day."

"Same length as all the others," Sophronia countered.

"Milk and butter!" A scornful murmur came from the dim shadows at the end of the room. "Did you bring us a dairymaid in the dory?"

Marigold felt the hairs prickle at the back of her neck, but she would begin as she meant to go on—logically and confidently.

"I'm sorry"—she addressed the shadows—"but I don't take your meaning."

"Pa's not going to like this."

"Mind yourself," was Sophronia's advice, but whether she was speaking to her niece or to the sneering shadow, Marigold could not yet tell. "Come and meet your cousin first I take her up," Sophronia ordered the shadow. "My sons, Wilbert and Seviah. This is your cousin Esmie Manners' girl."

Two tall forms detached themselves from the gloom and lurched forward. One was a handsome young man, roughly about her own age, with dark hair, tanned skin, and piercing golden eyes in a superbly well-fashioned face. The other was clearly his brother, perhaps older and still handsome, though his eyes were less piercing and his bone structure held a heavier share of ruddy flesh. They were attired in rough workingmen's canvas vests and pants over soiled shirtsleeves, and their dark expressions, as they stared at her, were idly hostile.

But Marigold had dealt with opposition from men of all sorts and ages all her life and could give as good as she got. "Marigold Manners. How do you do?" She stepped up and shucked her glove to extend her hand despite her blisters. "I am pleased to meet you."

"Come to take the place from us, have ye?" the older son growled.

Marigold was shocked by the suggestion. "No indeed," she stated baldly. "I'm only here for a visit." She would abide the filthy place only long enough for Sophronia to tell her what "godless wrong" had been done to Esm é .

"Come to live with us, she has, as is her right," their mother contradicted. "She's naught but a poor orphan now, with no money and no home, as needful of our charity as we are of her forgiveness."

The insult of pity was somehow sharper than it had been in Boston, coming from this arguably more pitiable creature. "I do have some money," Marigold assured her with cool, Bostonian hauteur, "which I hope will be put to my room and board as long as I'm here. You needn't fear I won't pay my fair share."

"We'll not take so much as a penny," Sophronia swore.

"Won't take her money?" muttered the younger son, before he spat on the floor. "Don't know as I'd take her forgiveness either, though there's other things I might like to take."

"There'll be no liberties, Seviah Hatchet, unless you'll want to burn in hell."

"Perhaps I will. Perhaps it would be worth the heat." The handsome young man laughed and made a show of flicking a wooden match to make it light. The sulfur flame winked deviously before he snuffed it out between his blunt fingers.

The suggestion was as crude as his behavior was rude. Marigold suddenly understood the urge to wash someone's mouth out with soap.

"Leave off." The other brother—Wilbert—shoved Seviah toward the door. "You heard her, no liberties. Likely no forgiveness either."

"I am sure I'd be happy to forgive," Marigold interjected, determined to be progressive in her judgment. "Only I've no idea what I'm to give forgiveness for."

They did not laugh at her attempt at humor. They did not so much as smile. They simply stared at her until they'd looked their loathsome fill, then shuffled off, back—judging by the dirt on their hands and the mud under their nails—to whatever stinking hole they must have crawled their way out of.

Which left her with her mother's cousin for answers.

Marigold took the moment to strip off her other glove and remove her outer garments, though she was mindful of the letter in her coat pocket. "I must say, Cousin Sophronia, I was quite surprised by your letter and your reference to a great wrong done to my mother, as that's the first I heard of it."

"She never told you?" For the strangest moment, her cousin gawped at her, as befuddled and slack witted as old Cleon. And then she seemed to come back to her narrow-eyed self. "Then I've said what I've said and I'll say no more." Sophronia waved a hand over her lips, as if that settled the matter. "Me and mine'll know what they're to do, and that's my first and last word on the matter."

She looked so foreboding and forbidding, Marigold was temporarily silenced. "But what am I to do?"

Sophronia shook her head before she turned away. "Ask me no more this night, for the hour grows old and I am weary of this talk." She took up the lamp again. "Come along."

Marigold set herself to follow her cousin through the inky gloom, but the house was acting strange underfoot—like a ship on the storm-tossed sea, rising and falling on the tide, shifting and wavering with the wind. Or more reasonably, shimmying side to side, like the train.

Marigold put a hand against the wall to steady herself.

"You drunk, Esmie's girl? Perhaps you're your father's daughter?" Sophronia narrowed her eyes.

Marigold bristled anew. Her father might not have been the most sterling of characters, but he was not a drunkard. Nor, certainly, was she, even if she did rather want a fortifying sip of Isabella's best amontillado sherry—there were no dank cellars at Isabella's house.

"Not a'tall, ma'am, I assure you." Marigold worked to keep her tone even. "I expect my condition is merely travel fatigue—a product of the continuous motion of the train carriages in concert with the exertion of rowing the dory. The phenomenon often happens after one takes a sea voyage." From Sophronia's dour, uncomprehending look, Marigold was sure her cousin had never traveled. "And please do call me Marigold—or Cousin Marigold will do, if you're feeling particularly formal."

Sophronia did not take the gentle invitation. "They'll be no alcoholic spirits in this house, Esmie's girl," the woman answered without emotion. "Your room's along here, separate from the others." She led her shuffling way down a meandering wing that seemed to turn left and right at random, as if the builder had been drunk when he pegged the house together out of the scattered bones of a shipwreck.

At the end of the hall was a door, next to which was a table with a dinner tray—complete with empty, scraped plates.

"Looks like someone enjoyed their supper," Marigold observed, not without a touch of envy. She'd certainly take "cold roast" now.

"Pay that no mind. It's no business of yourn," Sophronia warned. "Your room's here." She indicated a narrow, slatted attic door, which, when opened, revealed an even narrower set of attic stairs. "Up here."

Marigold followed with some trepidation, fearing a cold, dusty garret. But while the room did smell strongly of seaside damp, some small effort had been made at homeyness—the river-rock fireplace had a thin fire already laid, and a tattered gingham coverlet was spread across the tarnished brass bedstead. And there, on a weathered wooden stool next to the bedstead, was a chipped jam jar with a small posy—a golden-orange marigold with a few sprigs of wild rosemary. "How thoughtful."

It wasn't the height of style or fashion, but it would certainly do for the rudiments of shelter. Of course, Marigold had sensibly packed her own sheets in her valise. Even without bread or butter, she could clearly survive the night. "Thank you, Cousin Sophronia."

The older woman shook her head and knelt to light the fire. "I knew you'd have to come. I saw it in the flames with my own ruined eyes. The curse will work its way. So don't thank me yet, Esmie's girl. Don't thank me yet."

Marigold felt she was being purposefully frightened. But to what end?

Even though her skin chilled, she returned her cousin's warning with her calm crocodile smile. "Of course not, Cousin. There's plenty of time for us to set things right."

Sophronia's dark eyes narrowed with some strange combination of malice and sorrow. "Oh, no. There's a well of wrong runs so deep, you'll never drain it dry. You'll drown in it first."