Chapter 16
“The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
Oscar Wilde
“Miss Manners?” came the summons the next morning while Marigold paused by the mail slots, attempting to read a letter from Sophronia. “Miss Manners, I should like to speak to you, please.”
Marigold left off her contemplation of Sophronia’s turkey rhubarb tonic recipe—Ethyl would have to be consulted on the possible toxicity of the ingredients—to find Miss Burke with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face.
She immediately set herself to soothe. “Yes, ma’am. What would you like to speak to me about?”
“There was an … urchin!” Miss Burke pronounced the words with the same effrontery one might display over the discovery of a cockroach. “Here, in my reception room with his dirty fingers and smudged face.”
Marigold wondered how this complaint might have anything to do with her, but still, confusion was no reason to abandon one’s manners. “I am so very sorry that he upset you, Miss Burke.”
“As well you should be, Miss Manners, because he came for you!”
“Me, ma’am?” Marigold feigned astonishment. “I don’t believe I am acquainted with any local urchins.”
“He left a note. A sticky, smudgy, filthy note.” Miss Burke held out the article in question on a white handkerchief, presumably to keep herself from any contact with said sticky, smudgy filth.
Marigold took possession of the scrap of paper, which still bore the faint traces of rhubarb jam. “Thank you, ma’am. I do apologize.”
“If you will keep having people come here, Miss Manners, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Naturally, ma’am.” Marigold tried to give appropriate gravity to the situation. “I’ll see what I can do to curtail the flow of urchins.”
“Thank you,” Miss Burke said with some small relief.
Marigold decided discretion was definitely the better part of valor and moved well away from Miss Burke’s reception room to read her note, which proved to be from Lucy, asking for Marigold to stop by the boardinghouse at her earliest convenience.
While she had planned to spend the time between her classes checking on her experiments—she was hoping that at least one of the fifth-century coins from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens’s preliminary survey of Ancient Corinth were ready to come out of solution.
But maybe she could convince … “Ethyl?” she called as she ran up to the Student Laboratory, “Are you here?”
Ethyl poked her head out of her ventilation hood. “How now, brown cow? What’s got you all up in a pother? Got another of your mother’s tonic receipts for me to translate?”
“Something else—I need to cycle into the town for a short bit. Do you think you could check on my second electrolytic tank for me? I’ll be back later, but I don’t want—”
“Lordy, Marigold! You know Professor Cleaver is due up here any minute to make her biweekly evaluation. You’d best take the pH of your solution and check the battery connections, at the very least. Normally, you know I don’t mind helping, but I’ve got to have this distillate ready for her to test for purity.
Just make sure your monitoring data is up to date, and she’ll likely be satisfied.
But I’ll tell you what I will do—I’ll be sure to take up all of her time with my questions, so she won’t have but a half second to spare for yours. ”
“You are a darling.”
Ethyl smiled in her easygoing way. “You go ahead and tell that to everyone you know. You know, you’re lucky old Professor Cleaver likes me so much, she’s too taken up with praising my experiment to do anything more than steal a quick glance at yours.
And you’re danged lucky I’m so good at my work and attentive to my experiment that I can cover for yours. ”
“I am damnably lucky!” Marigold agreed. “Always have been.”
She finessed her way through the work Ethyl recommended and whisked herself out of the laboratory before any sign of Professor Cleaver, smiling all the way to the bicycle rack and most of the way to the boardinghouse on Washington Street, where Lucy awaited her on the carriage drive.
“Only got a moment or two,” Lucy said as soon as Marigold was within earshot. “Mrs. Barnacle’s due to come back any minute now. I sent her out to the butcher herself—to prepare them that I’m going to be shopping on her account—and so I could have a little snoop around.”
Marigold had to laugh. “I thought you said you wouldn’t snoop.”
“Well, I ended up poking my nose in a few of the rooms—collecting breakfast trays that I had sent up to the boarders. Reminded me of taking trays to old Mrs. Hatchet,” Lucy added in an aside.
Marigold felt as if a chill had settled onto her shoulders at the very mention of the old woman’s name. “Let us pray that none of your boarders are as homicidal as old Mrs. Hatchet.”
“Amen to that,” Lucy rejoined. “But I wanted to tell you that I saw something you might want to know in the Professor Currier’s room.”
“Yes?” Marigold’s curiosity prickled along her spin like an errant electrical charge.
“She has a photograph, up in a nice frame and all. A photograph of her and a girl. And that girl is looking at her pretty special like, if you know what I mean.”
Marigold did not know exactly what she meant. “Do you mean amorously?”
It would not be unheard of for an educator to have a fancy for one of their students—especially one termed a protégée—nor for a student to develop an infatuation for a teacher.
Nor for two teachers to form an attachment.
The region had even given a name to the phenomena of two women seeming to prefer each other’s company to that of men: a Boston Marriage, which was a snide euphemism for the cohabitation of two women in a quasi-marriage of convenience.
Never mind that women had been forming romantic friendships and life partnerships since the dawn of time—and certainly during the Archaic Greek period Marigold was currently studying, in which Sapphic poetry from the island of Lesbos featured prominently—and most certainly long before there had been a Boston, Massachusetts, for lesbians to cohabit in!
But that didn’t make a woman’s preference for the company of women any more socially acceptable.
Perhaps this was what the professor had to hide? But … “A girl? How old a girl?”
“Okay, maybe I misspoke,” Lucy considered. “A young woman would be a better description.”
Marigold’s feelings were only a little relieved. “Let me see it.”
“Well, that’s the thing—it’s gone!” Lucy exclaimed.
“I’d got a good eyeful and was thinking I ought to tell you about it, when not a half an hour later, that Professor Currier came down asking everyone—staff and boarders alike, if they had seen it, because she couldn’t find it anywhere.
Which is odd, because she only has the two rooms. It’s not like you could get lost up there. ”
“Where is Professor Currier now?”
“She’s still up there, in a taking, turning over every pillow and scrap of linen because she ‘can’t lose it now!
’ And ‘If I didn’t know better, I would think that horrid bully Valentine had done this.
’ That’s what she was saying, all anxious and fluttering.
So, I helped her, thinking I might learn something.
All she would say was that the photo had sentimental value, as it was of somebody who was no longer here.
I asked her if that meant had the girl passed and she didn’t say anything, just searched all the harder, pulling up cushions and looking behind curtains like a madwoman. ”
“Did she seem more concerned that people might have seen the photo or more concerned that it was gone?”
“That it was gone,” Lucy said emphatically, before she broke off, her gaze focusing over Marigold’s shoulder.
“Morning, Mrs. Barnacle. You remember my friend, Miss Manners, who gave you my cookbook? Now, what have you got for me today? Oh, that looks to be a nice lamb shoulder. I’ll be right in, ma’am, to decide upon the menu for your guests after I see my friend Miss Manners on her way.
She came by to see how I was getting on, and I was just telling her this is the best equipped kitchen that I have ever had the pleasure of cooking in. ”
Marigold took her cue. “I won’t keep you any longer from that lamb, Lucy.” And when the landlady had taken herself out of earshot, she added, “Is there anything else you can remember about the photo? About the girl, what she’s wearing?”
“Plain white dress.”
“Or where the photograph was taken—” Another thought occurred. “Never mind. I think I know where the photograph might have been taken. Thank you for letting me know, Lucy. I am very much obliged.”
“All right then. I’m glad I let you know.”
Marigold returned to campus all afire with the idea that she might be able to find the photographer, if not the photograph. If Professor Currier was trying to publicly conceal something that might shed light on the girl’s identity, Marigold was hopeful she could circumvent her.
Eliza Anthony was exactly where Marigold had hoped she would be—deep into her darkroom processing.
“Did you take a portrait of Professor Currier recently?”
This time, Eliza Anthony was far less alarmed by Marigold’s interruption—she didn’t even pause in tonging her photograph out of its solution bath. “Don’t you ever knock?”
Marigold was startled out of her outage but not her determination. Yet Eliza Anthony had a point. One might adapt one’s standards but never let them down.
“I am sorry. Forgive me.” She stepped back and rapped upon the nearest cupboard. “Miss Anthony, might I have a word?”
Eliza drew back one of the curtains to let in the light. “It depends upon which word you want.”
“The word I want is photograph, and the subject is Professor Currier.”
Eliza frowned. “I don’t have the concession to take faculty—only seniors, or other graduate degree recipients, who get their portrait made for the Legenda.”