Chapter 27
“Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.”
Mark Twain
Marigold and Ethyl were trudging back downstairs when the sound of footfalls in the stairwell diverted their attention.
“Marigold!” A familiar strong voice called up the stairwell. “Come quick!”
Both Marigold and Ethyl immediately ran down the stairs in time to see Lucy cresting the fourth-floor landing.
“Something is wrong with the professor!”
“You see,” Isabella, who came to Marigold’s dormitory room doorway—and who had clearly spent the time since Ethyl and Marigold had gone upstairs in sampling more sherry—seized her moment. “I told you Lucy would have it in hand.”
“Not even a little bit,” Lucy rejoined as she immediately turned back the way she had come. “Come on! Something is seriously wrong.”
The four of them went pelting down the stairs—well, Marigold and Lucy and Ethyl pelted. Isabella followed a brisk but decidedly less pell-mell pace.
“Where is she?” Marigold asked as they went down.
“I left her in her classroom—”
“This way!” Marigold caught Lucy’s hand and tugged her down a short corridor to the porter’s stairway, which brought them down to the first floor much more directly than the grand staircases might. “What’s happened?”
“The professor took a fright. I was upstairs at the boardinghouse, in the corridor, collecting trays the way I do—”
They clambered down another turn of flights.
“And I heard her cry out and a crash,” Lucy panted, “like something fell.” She paused to catch her breath. “I ran up there and then she came to the door all white as a ghost, saying, ‘This is his doing.’ ”
“Was it the tabloid?” Marigold resumed her descent.
“Maybe—there was a paper on the floor behind her, when she came out of her room.”
“Damnation.”
“There was a chair on the floor too—turned on its side. And she kept saying, ‘This is his doing. He’s here. I know he’s here.’ ”
“Who?”
“No idea. I looked. Wasn’t another soul in the place.”
They spilled out into the wide first-floor corridors and turned for the Rhetoric classroom.
“She said she had to get out of there, the professor.” Lucy took up the tale again. “Said she wasn’t safe.”
“Safe from what?” Marigold demanded as they ran the last few yards. “Or whom?”
“No idea. I told you, I looked. But she said she wanted to come here, where she would be safe, so I brought her. Figured you’d know what to do.”
“Me?” While Marigold had always prided herself on being a take-charge, take-action sort of person, she took one look at the professor and knew without any doubt that she was well out of her depth.
Professor Currier stood unsteadily at her desk, pale and nearly shaking from some force within, gripping the edges of the heavy oaken table as if it were a lifeline in a storm. “I need my medicine. Will you—”
“Yes, of course,” Marigold began. “Where—?”
The enfeebled woman could only point toward her desk drawers, so Marigold started at the closest one and began pulling out drawers, filled with ink bottles and steel pen nibs, until she came to the bottom drawer, which contained a small, medicinal-looking amber glass bottle labeled “Atropine Sulphur granules.” “Is this—”
“Yes,” Professor Currier gasped. “Please. Two.”
Marigold measured out two of the granules, which the shaking woman pushed onto her tongue.
“No!” Ethyl shouted suddenly and went for the professor’s face, gripping her jaw and forcing her mouth open to scrape out the granules with her fingers.
“What are you doing?” Marigold asked with growing horror. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Please,” the professor begged. “I need—”
“No. I swear, they’ll only do you harm,” Ethyl explained. “I swear. I think you’ve already had too much.”
“Took them at home,” Currier panted. “But they didn’t help. Made it worse.”
“Yes,” Ethyl agreed with her before she turned to Marigold. “I think she shows all the signs of atropine poisoning—dry mouth and dilated, nearly black pupils.” She took up the professor’s wrist. “Low, slow, reedy pulse and agitated, labored breathing.”
“It’s because of him,” Currier cried in a weak panic. “I saw him! He was there.”
“Agitation and confusion,” Ethyl continued, pointing to the professor’s stained shirtwaist. “Sweating and elevated body temperature. We need to get Dr. Barker.”
“I’ll go!” Marigold immediately responded, happy for something to do besides watch with dawning horror—Lucy wouldn’t know where the Hospital Wing was.
And so she ran, racing into the corridor and up the nearest staircase, calling out, “Dr. Barker! Get Dr. Barker!”
By the time Marigold had made it to the second floor, Dr. Barker, dressed in a hygienic white smock and cap over her usual dark dress, was coming through the Hospital Wing doors. “What on earth is going on here?”
“Professor Currier has been poisoned—we think,” Marigold added as an explanation for something that she could not really explain. “Ethyl thinks she’s had too much atropine?”
“But she’s so careful. I prescribed her dosage myself.” Dr. Barker frowned before she shook her head and seemed to understand the urgency of the moment. “Where is she?”
“Her classroom.” Marigold was turning to lead the way back down to the ground floor, while continuing to try to explain. “She came from her boardinghouse because she said she’d be safe here. And she tried to take the medicine—the atropine in her desk, but Ethyl stopped her and told me to get you.”
Dr. Barker said nothing, but when they burst back into the classroom—which was now slowly filling with collegians who had been attracted by all the commotion—she found her voice. “Clear the way! Let me through!”
Marigold and Dr. Barker pushed their way through to the desk where Imogen Currier was seated, attended by Lucy, who had somehow found a cool cloth to press to the professor’s brow, and Ethyl, who kept hold of the professor’s wrist.
“I counted her pulse at twenty-eight the first time,” Ethyl said immediately as Dr. Barker came beside her. “Times two is fifty-six beats per minute, which is—
“Not good,” was the doctor’s simple response.
“But it’s weakening still,” Ethyl explained. “Twenty-seven now.”
“Imogen,” Dr. Barker said sternly. “How much did you take?”
“The usual.” The professor’s voice was nothing more than a whisper. “One granule when I felt … when I felt so weak and anxious.” She swallowed and tried to rally. “But it was all wrong. Different. I immediately felt—” She subsided back into her chair as if she were shrinking before their eyes.
“Are you sure?” Dr. Barker demanded. “You didn’t accidentally—”
“No!” The professor’s protest was feeble but sure. “Tampered,” she muttered. “I saw him. I’m sure. He did it.”
“Who?” Marigold pressed. But the woman closed her eyes tight and gave no answer.
“If her medicine, or the dose, were tampered with,” Dr. Barker theorized, “you might be right about the poisoning.”
Marigold felt that horrible feeling of helplessness wash over her, like the water closing over her head when she tried to reach Olivia Thayer. “What can we do to counteract it?”
Everyone in the room looked to the doctor for the answer, but it was Ethyl who supplied a response. “The physostigmine!” Ethyl gasped. “If it’s atropine poisoning— I’ve successfully isolated the compound. Should I get it?”
She looked to Dr. Barker for the answer. And so did they all turn as one to await the doctor’s decision.
“Professor Cleaver has confirmed that you have isolated an antidote?” the doctor asked.
“Yes. Twice.”
“Then yes, please,” Dr. Barker finally answered. “Go! Now!”
“Help me,” Ethyl appealed to Marigold, catching her hand as she went for the door, so Marigold ran with her, hard on her heels—or as hard as she could muster after already having run up the flight to the Hospital Wing—up the full five flights to the attic level.
Thank goodness for Wellesley’s commitment to physical education and fitness, which made them as strong in body as their academics made them in mind. Still, Marigold was out of breath from the exertion as she followed Ethyl into the Student Laboratory and Apparatus Room.
“Hold this—there. Tightly,” Ethyl instructed as she began to pull apart the complicated structure of clear glass flasks and angled condensing pipes.
She extricated a tube from a rubber gasket and freed the receiving flask at the end.
“I just finished this yesterday morning,” she explained as she pawed through a drawer looking for a rubber stopper to seal the flask.
“Professor Cleaver and I tested it to make sure it was chemically pure, but—” She left the doubt unspoken as she headed for the door, carrying the flask in front of her as if it were the crown jewels.
“No, Wait!” She turned around. “Get a calibrated measuring pipette—third drawer!”
Marigold quickly rifled through the drawer until she found a thin stem of glassware with ruler-like marks all down the edge, like a clear thermometer, but larger and without the mercury. “This?”
“Yes! Carefully now!”
They went at a careful trot, carrying their respective treasures in front of them as they descended past young women who seemed to be acting as sentries.
“They’re coming,” one bawled down the corridor to the next, who then relayed the message on, until Marigold felt like she had a centurion-like escort back into the classroom, where the doors were held wide and the students had formed a sort of gauntlet to let them through.
“Dose?” Dr. Barker demanded tersely.
“I—” Ethyl’s nerve began to give way. “I don’t exactly— Safest would be one drop at a time?”
“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “Sound plan.” She took the pipette Marigold offered her and measured out several drops. “Imogen, open your mouth.”
Marigold felt as if the whole room was holding their collective breath.
Lucy held one of the professor’s hands while the doctor reclasped her other wrist, monitoring her pulse.
Next to Marigold, Ethyl had her arms wrapped tightly about herself, as if she feared she might fall apart, her knuckles white with tension.
Marigold put her arm around her shoulder in comfort and support.
But no one said anything. Moments ticked by, turning into minutes.
And then Dr. Barker said, “Her pulse is stronger, less erratic.”
It was as if they all drew breath at once, so audible was the room’s sigh.
“Well done, Miss Rautencranz.” Dr. Barker looked to Ethyl. “Well done, indeed.”
Ethyl—so unflappable and easygoing—burst into tears and hid her face in Marigold’s shoulder as her fellow collegians, murmured their praise and patted her on the back and shoulder.
“Oh, well done, Ethyl.”
“How brilliant.”
“It’s decided—Senior Class Genius, Ethyl Christine Rautencranz,” Marigold told her, as her fellow collegians said, “Hear, hear!” and “Absolutely!”
“Now then.” Dr. Barker took charge. “Phyllis, Daphne, please go to the Hospital Wing and bring back a portable stretcher. Nurse will know where it is.”
In the hubbub of action and recounting of the event, Marigold was able to give Ethyl’s shoulder a squeeze.
“I have never been more grateful for our shared experience with poisoners than I am at this moment. If Professor Cleaver doesn’t pass you with honors for this moment alone, I’ll eat my gown and mortarboard. ”
“No need, Marigold,” counseled Dr. Barker. “I’ll be sure to make that recommendation myself.”
“Thank you, Dr. Barker.” Ethyl was a puddle of gratitude.
“No, thank you. Thank you both.” Dr. Emilie Barker looked from Marigold to Ethyl and back. “You’re both a credit to your educations and your college. As is your friend here.” She acknowledged Lucy. “Intellectual rigor combined with moral courage—the ideal Wellesley women.”