Chapter 21
“There is nothing so powerful as truth—and often nothing so strange.”
Daniel Webster
Marigold had what she had come for—the telegram, with its limited information to pass to Cab to decode. She had just reached her bicycle and was about to mount when a voice stopped her.
“Marigold! Miss Manners.” It was Professor Currier, tying the tapes to her bonnet and cape as she came through the door.
“I hoped I could catch you. Are you heading back to campus? I feel I want the noisy companionship of my students at dinner this evening. As much as I share my sister’s grief, I feel as if I must—”
Marigold heard something she had not before. “Your sister?” she asked to be very clear, as sisterhood was a concept with a vast reach at Wellesley that had little to do with family trees.
“Yes, my older sister, Almira. Almira Currier Thayer. I thought everyone knew,” she said at Marigold’s rather too-obvious frown. “Almira, Imogen, and Lucinda, the Currier girls from Newton. Olivia is my niece, so it was no surprise to me when she excelled at rhetoric.”
“You never said she was your niece,” Marigold exclaimed. “When you were telling President Irvine about how you feared the dead girl might have been Olivia, you never said she was your niece.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No.” Marigold was sure she would have remembered such an important piece of information—it would have saved her from a number of incorrect, unsavory conjectures. “You said she was the daughter of dear friends. You said she was your protégée, nothing more.”
Color rose across the professor’s pale cheeks.
“I must apologize. But I suppose I made a habit of keeping the connection quiet for Olivia’s sake, so her work might rest upon its own considerable merit.
I didn’t want people to think that the only reason I took Olivia on was because she was related to me.
” Professor Currier seemed to belatedly catch the accusation in Marigold’s tone.
“But I never lied about it intentionally, with an object to deceive. The people who mattered knew.”
“The people trying to solve her murder didn’t know.”
“Well, it hardly matters now,” the professor said.
But the exercise of having to explain herself seemed to wear out the professor’s thin store of strength—she wavered a bit, unsteady on her feet.
Marigold instantly dropped her bicycle and took her arm. “Professor?”
“Yes, thank you. I fear I’ve overdrawn my strength.” She drew in a steadying breath. “I had wanted to thank you for your kind words, in the house, but find I am weary body and soul. Would you mind terribly walking me home? It’s just down Washington Street.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” She would come back for her bicycle later.
Professor Currier leaned heavily on Marigold’s support as they made their slow way back down the street, pausing when the professor said, “Let me just catch my breath.” She sat heavily on a stone wall. “That Wilkie Valentine has certainly caused a great deal of ungodly harm.”
“Wilkie Valentine?” Something about the name sounded familiar—perhaps the similarity to the infamous actor John Wilkes Booth, whose name was, even after nearly thirty years, still synonymous with “traitor.” Certainly, the feeling of betrayal—of goodness and right, and the cause of women’s suffrage, and of Olivia herself—left a sour taste in Marigold’s mouth.
Thankfully, the ever-vigilant Mrs. Barnacle was at the front door to usher them in.
“Oh, Imogen,” she fussed. “You’ve overdrawn yourself.
Come rest in the parlor for a spell before you go up.
I’ll have Miss Dove bring you something bracing.
Lucy!” she called. “Professor Currier is in need of a restorative.”
“No, no,” Imogen Currier insisted. “I just need my nerve pills. For my heart, really, not my nerves,” she explained to Marigold, “though that’s what the doctor calls them, the pills. I’ll just rest a bit before I go up to take them.”
Lucy had come at Mrs. Barnacle’s call. “I’ve got just the thing for you, ma’am—a good bone broth of my own recipe. I’ll have it to you in no time. You just rest easy.”
“Yes, I think I will,” Professor Currier said. “Just for a minute.”
“Thank you, Lucy.” Marigold added her own thanks that Lucy was “on the inside,” as much to care for the poor woman as to give Marigold information—information that was no longer necessary.
There was nothing untoward about an aunt being worried for a beloved niece. There was nothing tawdry about her having a photo of a relation. There was nothing out of character in a college professor wanting that young woman to excel in her chosen field.
The professor’s interest was, contrary to Marigold’s first impression, entirely innocent.
It was no wonder the woman was, quite literally, sick with grief. Grief that Marigold had done little to allay, when she ought to have known better. She ought to have recognized that the strange admixture of great sadness, anger, guilt, and despair was as unpredictable as it was powerful.
Her own grief for her parents’ deaths had been muted at first—they had been estranged due to her choice to become a New Woman and her devotion to her education. But it had compounded over time—each new revelation at Great Misery Island had made her feel their loss anew.
So it must be for Professor Currier, who had not only lost a beloved niece, and who had to suffer her sister’s grief, but also had to weather the professional loss of a prized student and protégée.
Not to mention the philosophical blow to universal suffrage, a cause particularly dear to her.
It had been a series of hardships, indeed.
Marigold could only hope that the worst was over—the poor woman didn’t look as if she could stand another blow.
“Miss Burke?” Marigold stopped at the reception room on her way back into College Hall.
She had collected her bicycle along with her aplomb and decided decisive action was necessary.
“Might I be able to use the telephone? I am more than willing to pay for its use, if need be. I have some information regarding the murder of Miss Thayer that I need to share with a colleague in Boston.”
“Yes, of course. Do come in.” Miss Burke immediately ushered Marigold back into her inner sanctum. “Normally, students are not allowed the privilege, except in emergencies, you understand. But Miss Thayer was a particular favorite.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I greatly appreciate your help.” Marigold was mindful of both the privilege and the responsibility. “I’ll need to ring up the Boston exchange again, if you please.”
“Do you remember how to do it?”
“I think so,” Marigold answered. “I crank the cylinder here?”
“That’s it,” Miss Burke encouraged. “Go ahead.”
Marigold stooped down and cranked the cylinder to ring into the exchange. “Boston, please.”
“Boston exchange for Wellesley College,” came the disembodied rejoinder. “One moment for Boston.”
A series of static clips and plugs indicated the various connections the switchboard operator made. “Boston exchange. Your party?”
“Armory, Dana, and Cox law offices, State Street.”
Another series of static and electrical noises preceded a posh clerk’s pronouncement of “Wellesley College? Armory, Dana, and Cox. Your party, please?”
“Mr. Cox, please. Mr. Jonathon Cabot Cox,” Marigold added in case there were multiple cousins or uncles in the family firm.
“And whom shall I say is calling?”
“Miss Marigold Manners.”
“Oh! Miss Manners. One moment, ma’am.”
Marigold didn’t know whether to be excited or diminished in being recognized at Cab’s place of business. But she did not have long to contemplate, because in no time at all Cab was on the line. “Marigold, is that you?”
“Yes!” She shouted her answer into the speaking horn. “I’m sorry to tell you that I have new information that may throw my former request into disarray.”
“How’s that?”
“The dead young woman has been identified as Olivia Thayer.”
“So you were right—your instinct was correct,” came Cab’s reply.
“I wish I weren’t.” One never wanted to make too much of oneself—especially when one was shouting one’s private thoughts into a machine attached to a wall.
“But I’ve got the wire Wilkie Valentine—that’s his name, Valentine—sent to the Thayers regarding their supposed elopement, and although it contains no new information in the text, it does tell us the elopement was fabricated out of whole cloth. ”
“How so?” Cab’s muffled shout came back.
“The date, for one—it was sent on the Monday morning, and the autopsy results said that Olivia Thayer had been dead since about seven the night before. So the whole of the wire was a lie, designed to throw the Thayers off the truth and delay her identification.”
Cab made a filthy noise that Marigold interpreted as a curse word.
“Indeed. But there are also some other miscellanea on the telegram that I hoped might be of use in deciphering more of the truth. Do you think you might be able to help me with that?”
“Absolutely,” was Cab’s immediate answer. “Fire away.”
“It’s a Western Union Telegraph. And there are three little boxes with coded information, I think—Number, Sent By, and Received By, which are SN, then JW, and a sort of a swoopy sign. At the very top box it says ‘15 Paid.’ ”
“The sender paid for fifteen words, which is standard.”
“I see. Then on the left side it says, ‘Received, 7:57 AM So. Natick’ and opposite, on the right side, it is dated October eighth.”
“Which means he sent it from South Natick—that’s the SN, and the clerk will be the JW—at nearly eight o’clock in the morning, well after the RMS Utopia sailed from the Boston docks. So our checking of the passenger lists wasn’t entirely an exercise in futility.”
“Lies,” Marigold confirmed. “All lies.”
“What else does it say? Read me the exact text.”
“To Mr. Thayer, Blossom Street, Wellesley.”
“No first name?”
“No.” She paused. “Is that significant?”