Chapter 10 #2
“Nor I you.” Marigold employed her smile to good effect—Miss Anthony took a further step back.
“From the angle of your photograph, you must have concealed yourself in the woods just up the slope from the boathouse, where you snapped away without announcing your presence. Did you hear the commotion and then come, or did you chance upon it by accident?”
“I … Well, I …”
“A detective camera, was it?” Marigold moved toward the shelf where several cameras were housed. “No matter which one—I’m tempted to break them all.”
“You won’t dare!” The young woman moved to protect her precious equipment. “That’s against the rules!”
“I would dare,” Marigold said quite simply. “I’m Marigold Manners. We haven’t met, but you should know I have a reputation for doing exactly what I say I will.” And at that moment, she was angry enough not to care about the rules.
Miss Anthony took up a defensive posture between Marigold and the cameras. “These are not your property, and the student code of ethics expressly forbids one student from stealing or destroying the personal property of another.”
“What does the student code of ethics have to say about spying on your fellow students with said personal property—to wit, a camera? I should think it an egregious violation of their expectation of privacy.” Marigold might not be studying the law, but she still had read enough to have a thorough understanding of the correct vocabulary.
Miss Anthony stilled, and then tried a different tack. “You have to understand—” she began.
“I do not,” Marigold contradicted. “You violated my privacy and Dr. Barker’s, whilst she was in the midst of her professional duties. But more importantly you violated the privacy of this as yet unidentified young girl. Did you not think of her?”
Eliza Anthony put up her chin, in a gesture Marigold recognized well from her own mirror. “I can’t afford to.”
Marigold was taken aback, by both the evident sincerity and the deep bitterness in her fellow student’s voice. “I fail to see how.”
“I am a photographer,” Eliza Anthony declared. “And I’m proud of it. But I need to be paid to be a professional photographer. You can’t imagine how hard it is as a woman—a young woman—to be taken seriously as a professional in this field.”
Marigold’s antipathy softened slightly. This was a complaint she had not only heard before but often made herself.
“I can imagine, Miss Anthony. We all can, or I doubt we would be here.” It was one of the great dilemmas of their age, the changing place of women within American society and indeed the world.
At the college, women’s education and women’s suffrage were felt to be urgent and nearly sacred goals.
It was, to a great extent, the work of all their lives.
“I want to be a paid professional photographer, like the men, so I need to take advantage where and when I can. I must use the resources at my disposal, or I will not be given other opportunities. Frankly, I will never be given anything. I will have to work twice as hard to achieve half the results.”
Marigold was almost taken in. Almost. “You were given these cameras.” She picked up one piece of apparatus and turned it over to see the manufacturer’s stamp. “The Anthony Camera Company of New York?” Marigold looked her up and down. “I feel certain you weren’t charged full price.”
“Do not be so certain.” Eliza Anthony gave Marigold as good as she got. “Everything comes with some price, especially from family.”
As this was a lesson Marigold had lately learned the hard way on Great Misery Island, her indignation deflated a little.
But not entirely. “If we accept your need to be taken seriously as a professional photographer, why on earth did you sell the print to the Boston Evening Journal, the worst of the yellow-dog sort of tabloids? Why not one of the more reputable newspapers that would have printed the facts instead of this lurid sensationalism?”
Eliza Anthony was not to be cowed. “The more reputable papers won’t even see a young woman like me.” Up went that pointed chin. “The tabloids are not so nice in their standards. And they pay better.”
Marigold rearranged her indignation. “And I assume it costs a lot to maintain this setup?”
“It does,” Eliza confirmed. “The college only supplies a very little materiel for the fine arts classes on artistic photography, and the chemicals for development do not come cheaply.” Perhaps she could see that Marigold was softening, because she took a deep breath herself and assayed a smile.
“That’s what I was meant to be doing that day.
” She gestured to the tabloid. “Taking artistic landscape photographs for composition class. But landscape and buildings are boring—I like capturing people. I like portraits even better. Look.”
She turned to range in her cabinets and in another moment thrust several striking portraits of young collegians into Marigold’s hands.
If Marigold had expected stereotypical posed photographic portraits, with the subjects sitting stiffly in their best clothes, she was rather surprised to find Anthony’s sitters both relaxed and individual, adorned with both smiles and the implements of their prowess—rackets and oars and field hockey sticks and bicycles. And books. Lots and lots of books.
Young woman in the first flush of confidence and competency.
Marigold tried to resist being charmed.
But Miss Anthony saw her opening. “I’ve made something of a studio here, behind these curtains.
” She swept back another set of dark draperies to reveal a studio area full of soft, colorful pillows and fabric that reminded Marigold so strongly of her brother’s Scheherazade’s cave in the barn on Great Misery that she was momentarily taken aback.
“How lovely.” But very likely flammable—especially with all those volatile chemicals.
“I could take your portrait.”
Marigold could see the excitement—or was that avarice—that pinked Miss Anthony’s fair face. “And sell to the tabloids an even more recognizable likeness of the woman who found the body?”
Eliza Anthony didn’t bat an eyelash. “You could be famous.”
“I have no desire to be anything of the sort,” Marigold lied.
Because she had always aspired to be famous—as an archaeologist, with famous excavations of important digs and famous papers published in important journals, not in a seedy tabloid.
She wanted to be famous for her accomplishments, not for the fact that she had chanced upon a body. Or two.
Or three, actually.
Or did that make it four now?
“I’d split the profit with you.” Anthony tried a different approach. “The way I figure it, they’ll print what they like anyway, without so much as a by-your-leave, so you might as well get what you can out of them when they do.”
“How exceptionally mercenary of you,” Marigold accused.
“How eminently practical,” the young woman countered. “The world is the way the world is—my photographs are the only means I have of making my way in that world. I’m going to use them to my best advantage every chance I have.”
“And what if your best advantage is to someone else’s detriment? What then?”
Eliza Anthony crossed her arms over her chest, the very portrait of defiance. “I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“My dear Miss Anthony,” Marigold sighed. “You already have.”