Chapter 7
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Gentlemen, let me show you out.” President Irvine led the men to the door.
As they preceded her, she turned back to Marigold and Dr. Barker.
“We’ll call a chapel service presently, both to quell rumors and to take a strict counting of all the students and find out who is missing.
You’d best go change clothes,” she instructed Marigold.
“But, Marigold?” She leveled her gaze over her knitted brow. “Not a word of this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Marigold immediately acquiesced, because she had never gone against Julia Irvine’s authority or questioned her judgment.
“But why? Surely silence is dangerous? As you said, whoever strangled her”—she gestured to the poor soul still clothed in her Sunday best—“might still be out there, waiting in the dark to strangle another!”
Dr. Barker answered. “In my opinion and experience, until we know more, especially her identity,” she said, “a careful prudence is best. My observations are naught but suppositions until she is properly examined by the coroner’s office.
They are not yet confirmed facts. And as such, are not to be bantered around the college. Please.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Marigold was chagrined. “I understand.”
“Thank you. Do get some dry, clean clothes on at your first opportunity.” The doctor shook her hand and rubbed a consoling hand up Marigold’s arm.
“Thank you very much, both for your quick thinking and assistance and also for your courage. Not many young women would have been able to do what you did today.”
Marigold was equally surprised by such praise and such censure of her fellow collegians. “I’m sure any of the girls at the boathouse would have done the same.”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Barker conceded. “But I happen to think your kind of moral and physical courage is a rare thing indeed. So, thank you.” The doctor’s smile was bittersweet. “You had best go and get yourself into dry clothes before the bell rings for chapel.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marigold went but hardly knew how. It seemed impossible to walk out of the Hospital Wing after what she had just heard and witnessed.
One of them—one of any of the girls who lived and studied and learned in rooms up and down this cavernous building—had been strangled to death in the boathouse by someone who had then pushed her lifeless body into the waters of Lake Waban for Marigold to find.
She shivered anew as she trudged up the stairwell that connected most directly to her own dormitory room two flights above.
Ethyl Rautencranz met Marigold at her door. “Well, this is a fine old kettle of fish. You look just about done in,” she said, taking in Marigold’s blanket-wrapped appearance. “What did you say this morning? One foot on the grave and the other on a banana peel?”
“Indeed.”
“What did you learn down there?” Ethyl tossed her head in the general direction of the Hospital Wing.
“Nothing—not even her name.” Marigold strengthened her necessary fib with a smattering of the truth. “Let me get out of these wet things.”
Marigold stepped through her parlor and into her bedchamber where she quickly shucked her clammy clothes, leaving them, for expediency’s sake, in a chilly puddle on the floor.
“Is anyone missing from our hallway?” she asked through the open door as she chafed herself dry with a Turkish towel and pulled a fresh shirtwaist and skirt on—gray tweed, suitable to the solemnity of the moment, with a long deep-charcoal knit sweater for warmth as well as stylishness.
One might adapt one’s standards but never let them down.
“No one that I know of,” Ethyl answered from the doorway, with a quick look over her shoulder. “At least no one I wouldn’t miss. Oh, Lordy—speak of the devil and up she pops. Here she comes again—looking like miles of bumpy road.”
Marigold straightened her dry stockings and tied on her shoes—she would have to make sure to stuff her cycling boots with paper so they didn’t warp while drying—preparing herself for another conversation with Professor Cleaver, before she was met instead with Sarah Appleton’s preening disapproval.
“All this to-do is your doing, Marigold.” She took her time with Marigold’s name, elongating the first syllable in sarcastic emphasis. “How predictable.”
Although from her vantage point with one knee on the floor of her bedchamber Marigold could not see all the way into the hallway, she could hear footsteps gathering in the corridor—a ready-made audience, just as Sarah had no doubt hoped.
Her distant kinswoman’s smile was a particularly upper-class mixture of superiority, pleasure, and malice.
“Naturally,” Marigold answered as if she were entirely unperturbed.
“But one doesn’t like to make too much of oneself.
It’s a deplorable habit.” As was letting someone as shallow as Sarah Appleton so easily knock her off her metaphorical balance.
Marigold allowed herself a moment to try and restore something of her usual equanimity.
“Especially in the face of such a tragedy. I feel certain President Irvine, in her steadfast wisdom, will shed light on the situation presently.”
Almost as if she had wished it into action, the Japanese bell pealed through the building.
“A call to chapel—how eminently practical,” Marigold said brightly before she headed toward the sanctuary at the far end of the building. “Shall we?”
Even as she charged ahead, Marigold chided herself for not taking the opportunity of letting Sarah go first so she might observe her—and perhaps see if those long, strong patrician hands of hers seemed scratched or abraded, as if they had been in some secret set-to at the boathouse.
But it was too late to turn back, and her progress with her own growing group of supportive rowers in tow, who seemed to have materialized out of thin air—likely thanks to Ethyl—had been noted.
Marigold might no longer be the Classics scholar, but she still had some worth to her fellow students.
And so she took the helm, steering her crew to where the president awaited them, standing on the dais of the chapel auditorium, with the faculty seated in an array behind her.
In the time that had passed since Marigold had pulled the poor girl out of the water, the chill autumn afternoon had waned into cold evening. The chapel was lit, but somehow the flickering amber gaslight only seemed to add to the eerily tense atmosphere.
“Come in, quietly now, please,” President Irvine directed, “and sit with your dormitory halls, if you would.”
There was some shuffling as girls removed themselves from their seats to comply, but in another minute or two the assembly was satisfactorily seated.
Marigold and Ethyl seated themselves at the far end of their row, while noting that the house mothers and faculty members who were residents on halls were taking a not-so-surreptitious count of their charges.
“Good evening, ladies,” Julia Irvine quietly commanded their attention.
“I will come straight to the point. Rumors have no doubt been circulating amongst the student body”—even as she said the word, Marigold could see that President Irvine instantly regretted her choice—“of the body of a young woman, perhaps one of our own, being found by another of our own and her fellow rowers, down at the college boathouse. And I will tell you plainly that it is true.”
A hubbub of distress arose from the gathering.
President Irvine held up her hands to quiet them.
“I hope you will take comfort in the knowledge that your fellow students conducted themselves most honorably and bravely, immediately retrieving this unfortunate young woman, and subsequently calling for not only Dr. Barker but also myself. I will further inform you,” she raised her voice to speak over the rising reaction from the assembly, “that the local authorities have also been alerted, to whom we shall look for assistance in identifying this unfortunate young woman.”
“But who is it?” a girl asked over-loudly.
“Who’s missing?” asked another.
President Irvine immediately quelled the simmering uproar.
“In answer to the first question”—Julia Irvine was nothing if not logically self-disciplined and organized in her response—“I’m afraid we have not yet been able to ascertain her identity.
And so, I would ask each of you to take this moment to look around for your friends, and classmates and colleagues, and if any one of them is missing, please report it to your nearest faculty member, or house mother, or my office, as soon as possible. ”
The babble rose to a near fever pitch as young women asked unthinkable questions.
Marigold watched—tense with a new sort of anticipation—as everyone around her turned to and fro, frantically seeking out friends and acquaintances.
Names were ticked off fingers in relief, girls stood, looking for classmates who were seated with other halls, while others gratefully clasped hands.
The noise of the assembly rose and fell as panic waxed and waned.
But no one put forth a name.
Presently, after the assembly seemed finally to settle back into some semblance of order, the president spoke again. “No one? Are we quite sure?” She made eye contact with the staff and resident faculty, and one after another they all shook their heads.
President Irvine let out a tense breath. “Then we will take this moment to say a grateful prayer of thanksgiving. And we will also take this moment to pray for the repose of this poor unfortunate soul who found her death amongst us.”
Along the rows, nearly all eyes were now returned to the front.
Julia Irvine was by her own religious inclination a Quaker, but the chapel services she conducted for the college were marked by a simplicity and distinctive elegance that made her a favorite of the student body.
Despite her slight build, she was still a commanding figure behind the chapel podium as she read them into service. “Let us bow our heads and pray.”
The sobered assembly of students obediently did so.
Marigold did not. Of course, she ducked her head a little—a very little—so as not to seem profane, but she used the moment to make a quiet exit from the room and make her way up the chapel stairs to the fourth floor, where she came out onto the chapel gallery.
From such a lofty perch, she could better observe the rows of her fellow students, taking notice if anyone was still turning her head this way or that.
Assessing if anyone still seemed particularly distressed.
Scouring faces for some furtive sign of knowledge. Or guilt.
She was disappointed to find Sarah Appleton’s head was dutifully and beautifully bowed, as if she knew piety was a good look for her.
Many other girls were tearful or quite understandably scared.
Marigold knew better than most what had already transpired on their campus, and she would honestly have to account herself one of the scared.
Or at least, one of the extraordinarily cautious. And extremely curious.
Although almost every head was bowed, the few that were not gazed respectfully at the dais. Marigold could mark no one out as being out of order—no one she could single out as too distressed or too calm.
As President Irvine’s precisely plainspoken appeal continued without incident or interruption, Marigold began to think she must be wrong—that perhaps the girl might not be from the college at all, when her eye was caught by a flutter of handkerchief in the second row of the faculty.
Marigold immediately recognized tiny Professor Imogen Currier, who taught Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric—a required class for all juniors, no matter their preferred area of study—and who, in the row of thoughtful, concerned faculty members, was quietly dabbing her eyes with visibly trembling hands.
A quick study of the generally more stoic faces of the faculty told Marigold that Professor Currier was not alone in displaying her feelings—several faculty members looked upset.
But none were as clearly distraught as Professor Currier.
She looked pale and almost pinched, though she was normally a gregarious, outgoing sort of instructor with a warm, open disposition.
But not today. Today she was white-faced and tearful, all but obscuring her face behind a large white handkerchief that fluttered like a flag of surrender in her hand.
As if, amongst all those assembled, she alone had something to hide.