Chapter 19
“They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Marigold felt an awful chill, as if she were back in the lake. The words were frightening to hear but ought not be surprising. After all, she had seen with her own eyes the violence done to Olivia Thayer.
And other women.
Still, the clammy discomfort crawling across her skin was personal. The threat to any woman of education or opinion was overt—men so often stopped women from speaking with violence.
But there was something else tickling at the back of Marigold’s brain. “You said this Valentine character began to pressure Olivia—pressure her to do what?”
“Go with him, be with him, to the exclusion of all else.” Professor Currier spoke with some heat.
“Perhaps he was also pressuring her to be physically intimate with him.” She closed her eyes again in that gesture of distaste.
“She did not say that exactly, only that he had begun to make her uncomfortable and dissatisfied with his demands.”
“Did you let her know that you disapproved of Mr. Valentine?” Isabella asked more pointedly.
“I told her I distrusted him,” Professor Currier answered.
“But I wanted her to make up her own mind. In this day and age, it is one of the few choices left to young women—who they will love. Or not love. I wanted her to choose for her own self, with no pressure from me. I chose that word purposefully, pressure, so she might have a reasonable, intelligent comparison with Wilkie’s approach. ”
The use of the familiar first name caught Marigold’s ear. “Wilkie? Did you know him well enough to use his first name?”
“No, not really.” The professor turned her head away again, gazing out the window before she shut her eyes, as if she were trying to blot the man from her memory. “That was how Olivia referred to him.”
“Had the Thayers met Mr. Valentine?” Isabella kept asking astute questions. “What was their reaction to this young man they didn’t know suddenly wooing their daughter?”
“They were cautious, I suppose,” Professor Currier said.
“I really don’t know how much she told them.
But I don’t think they ever met him in person.
I think that Valentine simply importuned her, especially when Olivia was on foot, going between the high school and our Wellesley College campus.
I can imagine him loitering about, almost lying in wait for her to come by. ”
Marigold made a mental note to ask the protective lodge keepers, Mr. and Mrs. Breyer, if they had seen this Valentine fellow “lying in wait” for the young aspiring collegian.
Or at least warn them—even if it were too late to protect Olivia Thayer, it was not too late to protect the hundreds of other young women who shared Olivia Thayer’s educational values and ambitions.
And innate vulnerabilities.
But the carriage was being reined to a stop outside an official-looking municipal building in the center of Dedham.
Thankfully, there was little traffic to impede them, as it was Saturday and the court was not in session.
As it was, Professor Currier was clearly very anxious about the ordeal to come, gripping her handkerchief tightly in her gloved hand.
Was it guilt, or simple fear?
Compassion urged her to assume it was the latter, until proven otherwise.
“Why don’t I go in first, to ascertain the correct place to enter,” Marigold volunteered as the groom opened the door and let down the steps.
“And once I know that, we’ll all go together.
We’ll be with you the whole time, ma’am.
You needn’t fear you’ll be alone. I’ve already seen her, that day at the lake. And Dr. Barker as well.”
“Yes, of course.” Professor Currier sniffed her gratitude into her handkerchief. “How terrible for you two.”
“It was terrible,” Marigold admitted. “Mostly because I felt so frustrated that there was nothing I could do to save her.”
“Was she—did she look … terrible?”
“No, ma’am,” Marigold lied quickly, before Dr. Barker might interpose with facts. “She looked very serene. Quite beyond pain or suffering.” She glanced at the groom waiting patiently. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
Marigold ascended the long, sloping front steps to the Norfolk County Courthouse, and immediately found herself under the notice of two uniformed bailiffs who loitered in the foyer with no other seeming employment than to amuse themselves with unaccompanied young women.
“All alone, miss?” one miscreant asked, with what Marigold was sure he thought was solicitous charm.
But Marigold was in no mood for either charm or loiterers. “I seek the coroner’s office.”
“The dead body office?” was his joking rejoinder. “Why not stay here where we are all alive and well?”
Despite several easy ripostes that came readily to her lips, Marigold was, for the sake of expediency, tempted to say nothing, serving only to let her coldest, most reptilian hint of a smile speak for her.
But the events that had brought her to this moment—the missteps and frustrations that brought them to this place—prompted her to speak.
“It remains damnable how easily the sight of an independent woman brings out the littleness in so many men.”
She ought to have left it at that, but something about the trials of the day—the trial of what was to come, the sheer unnecessary, futile unfairness of it all—goaded her on.
“Is it impossible for a man to simply let a woman go about her business without his confounded interference? Are you not capable of any form of self-restraint? Must you always, always, always make yourself, if not a mere nuisance, then a threat?” She advanced upon them with each word.
“Are you incapable of simply shutting up?”
She did not wait for their response but turned on her heel and noisily—so she might not hear their no-doubt ribald response—stomped away to seek out the lone female clerk lodged in the corner behind a wide oaken desk. “I seek the coroner’s office in order to identify a body, if you please.”
The woman’s gaze flicked between Marigold and what had happened behind her. “I am sorry,” she said before she supplied the information. “You’ll want to go back out and go downstairs, basement level. Entrance round on the Ames Street side. Dr. Prescott should be on duty today. He’ll help you.”
“Thank you.” Marigold strode back to the entrance, wishing she had the foresight to bring her steel-shanked umbrella as a precaution against importuning men—today she felt wicked enough to do someone a deliberate violence.
But petty vengeance was not why they had come—justice was.
The coroner’s office was entered from an unmarked side door on the west side of the building, next to a carriage drive and stable gate where hearses presumably came and went.
Marigold retraced her steps and directed Isabella’s coachman to drive around to the appropriate entrance before she assisted the other women from the carriage.
Dr. Barker paused at the threshold. “I do want to prepare you that the place might seem sterile and cold and uncomforting,” she told Professor Currier, “but Olivia feels none of that now. It is only our feelings that pain us, not hers.”
“Yes, yes, I will remember that.” Professor Currier gripped the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for that small mercy.”
“I’ll wait for you here,” Isabella said quickly, “And stay out of the way. And have things ready for your return.” She gestured to the hamper stored under her feet.
“Thank you,” Marigold said as she handed Professor Currier to the pavement.
“One always prays for courage,” the woman said quietly. “But one never likes it when God presents one with the opportunity to show one has it.”
Were those the words of a murderer? Or a grieving lover?
“No,” Marigold decided. “One never likes it.” She clasped the professor’s hand and tucked it under her own, hoping against hope her compassion was not misplaced. “But we are all glad to have it all the same.”
Inside, a darkened vestibule gave way to a long, creaking pine hallway that ended at a desk. “Dr. Emilie Barker, Professor Imogen Currier, and Miss Marigold Manners to identify the body of the young woman who was found in Lake Waban this past week.”
“Ah, yes, the lady doctor?” The round-faced clerk in the short white smock smiled with casual, everyday impudence. “Brought more of yourselves, so I see.”
Marigold instantly recognized the corpulent fellow from their meeting outside the Hospital Wing when he had come to collect the body. “So you see.”
“Marigold,” Dr. Barker cautioned quietly.
Marigold curbed her ire against insolent, insignificant men—for her colleague’s benefit, not the clerk’s.
“Well, sign here, and initial here.” The clerk was efficient, if nothing else. “Both of you. All of you? Well, then, sign here and here too.”
“We were told to ask for Dr. Prescott,” Marigold said.
“Were you?”
“Yes.” It remained damnable how easily the sight of more than one independent woman brought out more than littleness in so many men.
The clerk’s good opinion hardly mattered, but on such a day, with such a task before them, the casual cruelty of his assumed superiority—and indifference—ate at Marigold like acid.
Clearly Dr. Barker was thinking along the same lines. “Marigold,” she murmured again in warning. “As long as the coroner himself has followed the facts and physical evidence that presented itself, justice will be served.”
“I can only hope so,” Marigold huffed.
“We do not need to simply hope,” Dr. Barker told her calmly. “We will insist upon the truth. I will insist.”
“Naturally.” Marigold felt herself relax out of her belligerent posture. “Thank you for that reminder.”
The official register signed, they were ushered to the end of the hallway and told to wait until the coroner would be ready to see them. Marigold looked about for some place of repose, but no benches or seats—other than the one the commodiously sized clerk had occupied—were available.