Chapter 8

C HAPTER 8

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

—Margaret Fuller

"I shall be gathering some necessary things," Marigold concluded, mentally going over the store of hygienic and cleaning items in her trunks. She had hidden the stash of carbolics from Isabella, but she knew her friend would approve of such precautions now. "And then I shall need you to help me set to work, Cleon."

"Ayuh, Miss Girl," he agreed docilely, as if it were his penance, but then he brightened. "But there's Miz Sophronia now!"

Marigold turned in time to register the impression of an eye staring at her from behind the crack of the door before her cousin disappeared, as if she were afraid to be seen. "Cousin Sophronia?" Marigold called. "I thought I might assist you—"

Her cousin halted on the threshold. "You? How could you help me?"

Marigold's determination wavered a little in the face of such dour pessimism. "I am not afraid of hard work, cousin. I have extensive experience—"

"Experience is pain," Sophronia muttered. "Life is naught but suffering and sorrow. Drawn in like moths to the flame, women are, helpless. All of us doomed."

Although Marigold was taken aback by such an unaccountable segue, she was not afraid to disagree. "There is a great deal to be said for one's choice, Cousin," she returned matter-of-factly. "I am a woman, and I, for one, am not helpless. I don't feel the least bit mothlike or doomed."

Sophronia's eyes widened, as if she could not conceive of such a thing. Then her gaze narrowed on Marigold. "Mayhap," the woman considered in her measured, New England way, "there is something in you—some old magic come through the curse."

"Rational thought needs no magical assistance." Marigold could not help but correct such backward thinking.

Yet Sophronia plodded across the dusty, rutted dooryard, unswayed.

In the light of the overcast day, the farmyard—or whatever the collection of semidilapidated buildings that included the once-proud house, bowed barn, canting chicken coop, and various shanties and sheds was called—was even more bleak and down-at-heel than it had appeared last night. Litter of all sorts, large and small, was strewn about the place. Broken-down blades of equipment lay rusting where they had been abandoned. A few skinny chickens pecked through the dust and detritus . The appearance of the whole was persistently, dismally dirty.

And then Marigold heard it again—the eerie moan.

"I beg your pardon, Cousin," Marigold called after Sophronia. "But was that … the house moaning?" She fell back on Cleon's ridiculous explanation in the hopes that it might make sense to the odd woman.

"The house?" Sophronia stared at Marigold. "Have you lost your wits, Esmie's girl? Or are you drunk again?"

Marigold bristled anew. "I am most decidedly not drunk now, nor was I last night, as I have taken naught—and been offered naught—since I arrived." She curbed her tart tongue to add, "Cleon was the one who said the house was haunted. I myself think there must be some logical explanation for the noise."

"Ayuh," Sophronia agreed with a weary nod. "Because it's not the house giving out those sinful moans but the barn." And off she plodded, kicking up dusty straw as she went.

Marigold followed, mostly because now that she listened closely, the quality of the moaning was taking on an altogether different sound—entirely less eerie and more far more throaty. And decidedly more carnal.

"Seviah," Sophronia called upward to the hayloft. "Get down from there. Do you want to break your mother's heart?"

"Why not?" came the laughing answer from above. "Might as well get that in, too, while I'm breaking other things."

Sophronia looked pained. "Damn your handsome eyes. Get out of there and get to work."

Though what work she was referring to remained undiscovered, her son's knowing smirk appeared at the hay door of the loft above, where he stood, buttoning the few buttons that remained on his worn pants. "Just finished up here anyways," Seviah said. "Unless my little cousin, Miss Delicate City Manners, wants to have a go?"

"No, thank you," Marigold managed as politely as she might while containing her shiver of scientific revulsion at the very thought of copulation with one's cousin.

Seviah began to descend the ladder, but with him came a heeled half boot—a women's boot—that fell onto the muddy ground.

Sophronia sighed as if the weight of the world were dragging her down. "Get back to the parsonage, Minnie." She shook her weary head. "Preacher's child from Pride's Crossing, as wicked and wild as the wind. Get home before you come to grief!"

Seviah swung himself down to the ground and tossed the boot back up without a word of care to this still-unseen Minnie. "Showing our little cousin around, are you, Ma?" He tucked in his soiled shirttail. "So, she knows what she'll be taking from us?"

His aggressively snide tone prompted Marigold to defend herself again. "I'm not taking anything that doesn't belong to me."

He swaggered closer, crowding her back, attempting to intimidate her with his height. "And just what does belong to you?"

"I don't know," Marigold was forced to concede. She looked to Sophronia for some indication of what her "rights" might be, but Sophronia, with her mission to interrupt her son's coitus done, had disappeared. "Well, no matter what might belong to me, I am quite sure I want nothing that is rightfully yours."

"And we're to take the word of a citified, pert lady with her nose all turned up at the very stench of us earthy, hardworking men?"

"You don't appear very hardworking at the moment," Marigold observed.

"Oh, I'll bet I'm hard enough for the likes of you." He lowered his voice to a suggestive growl. "Hard enough to put you on your back and give you what you want."

Marigold might have answered him with a hard slap, at the very least—but she saw that what the wolfish young man wanted more than anything else was an argument, and so she set herself to thwart him. "If you're done with your louche attempt at being a Lothario, could you kindly tell me where I might find the hired girl?"

He immediately retreated. "Why do you want to know? No business of mine. I'm sure I don't know." Seviah hitched up his pants one last time before he swaggered away across the farmyard, singing a popular Tin Pan Alley tune: " Boys and girls together, we would sing and waltz, while Tony played the organ on the sidewalks of New York. "

What a strangely urban song to hear in the middle of a ruined New England farmstead.

But then somewhere farther away, another voice took up the song—a mellow alto, meshing with Seviah's rich tenor in perfect, easy harmony before it trailed off.

Marigold followed the sound around the back of the barn and down a slight slope to a shed, where the hired girl was opening the steep bulkhead door to a root cellar.

"Hello?" Marigold called as she neared. "Miss Dove? Might I have a moment?"

In the light of day, Lucy Dove proved to be a tall, handsome, young Black woman with warm skin and a cooler nature. Servant she might be, but her appearance was everything the Hatchets' was not—her clothes were as clean and neat and fashionable as anything on Beacon Hill's Cambridge Street, from her sharply pressed shirtwaist collar and apron to her well-polished half boots. Her hair was just as neatly dressed, wrapped in a soft blue calico scarf that matched the hue of her spotless skirts. "Is there something particular you want, miss?"

"I'm Mrs. Hatchet's cousin, Marigold Manners." Marigold felt some introduction was in order. "Thank you for your help with my bags last night."

"You're welcome, I guess. Anything else you want?"

"I understand you're the hired girl, and I wanted to see about hiring you myself."

"I've already seen to your trunks. You'll find them outside the breezeway door."

Marigold shaded her eyes to look across to the sun-bleached dooryard. "I thank you. Cleon made no mention." She turned back to see Lucy's wry smile. "But what I wanted to propose was a rigorous course of cleaning and disinfection in the house—"

"I don't set foot in the house," Lucy interrupted. She crossed her arms over her chest as if delivering an ultimatum. "Not a toe inside."

It confounded Marigold's sense of logic that a girl who had been hired to work in a place would not actually enter that place. "May I ask why?"

The girl took a long, considering look from the top of Marigold's soft chignon to the bottom of her now-dusty cycling boots. "No."

How forthright. Not to mention curious. Clearly, more than just Sophronia had secrets they wanted to keep. But Marigold had not come all the way across Salem Sound to let sleeping dogs lie to her face. No indeed. She had come to find the truth about a wrong, even if no one at Hatchet Farm wanted to tell her.

"I suppose I'll see if I can spend my money elsewhere." Marigold turned to survey the yard, as if that elsewhere might magically appear.

Lucy laughed. "I thought you were supposed to be a poor orphan?"

"My parents are deceased, yes, though I am of age and so not technically an orphan. And I do have a small, private income."

Lucy accepted that information with a nod. "Then let me tell you I'm not hired for the house," she explained, "but for the old lady, Mrs. Alva Coffin Hatchet, Mr. Ellery's mother."

This was a name Marigold felt she might remember. Her mother had once or twice mentioned an Alva Coffin—Esm é had always referred to her as a terror . But many things in life had terrified darling Esm é —like the prospect of getting a job.

"And does she live here?" Marigold eyed the mossy, shingled roof of the shed.

"Oh, no!" Lucy's laugh rolled down the rise. "She's got herself all set up in a big room in the house that she likes so much she never leaves it, not in all the years I've been here. This back house is all mine. I've got it all fixed up the way I like. All private. With a good lock."

After barring her own door with a chair last night, Marigold was all appreciation for the protection of a good lock, if not the need for it. "However private, it is a very poor lot to live in a fish shack."

"Don't let them hear you calling it that. This back house Mr. Ellery's father built himself first thing when he settled out here on Great Misery. I keep it just so. Take a look." Lucy gestured down the cellar stairs.

"Thank you, there's no need," Marigold responded, for her readings of Mr. Poe's work had taught her that it was entirely nonsensical, not to mention dangerous, to follow a person one didn't know into an unlit root cellar on a rather decrepit New England farmstead.

And she could see from where she stood that the walls were stacked with storage bins and canning, along with a burlap-wrapped ham that hung from the rafters on a wicked iron hook that looked as if it had been there since the original construction of the edifice. Which made it a historical shack, but a shack nonetheless.

"If you're employed by Mrs. Alva Hatchet, who never leaves her room, why do you not live in the house with her?" Judging by the many dark, vacant windows staring down from the roofline like sightless eyes, there appeared to be a vast number of empty rooms under the warped eaves.

"Oh, no." Lucy's mouth curved into a smile that would have been lovely had it contained a smaller share of derision. "Too close for some people's comfort." Her glance skittered casually away, but Marigold fancied there was a definite glance toward the path Seviah Hatchet had so recently trod.

Marigold took a second look at the half boots Lucy wore, but her long skirts obscured Marigold's view.

Such an interesting and varied lot of secrets the folks on Great Misery seemed determined to keep. And perhaps Marigold might let them—it was no business of hers if Lucy wanted to dally with Seviah Hatchet in the hayloft. The only business Marigold was interested in was the "great and godless wrong" that had been perpetrated against her sweet mother.

The rest of their secrets, these difficult, fornicating Hatchets might gladly keep.