Chapter 28
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Benjamin Franklin
The moment the following morning Dr. Barker declared Professor Currier sufficiently recovered to speak from her bed in the Hospital Wing, Marigold was at her bedside.
“She is still very weak,” Dr. Barker explained quietly. “So I beg you not to tire her out. She’s had a terrible shock, both physically and emotionally. I’ll end the interview if I think you’re adversely affecting her recovery.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Marigold answered. There was only one question she needed to know the answer to—she had barely been able to sleep for thinking about it. “Good morning, Professor.”
“Marigold.” Imogen Currier held out her hand in thanks. “Where is your fellow scientist, Miss Rautencranz? I find that I am very much in her debt.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t feel so, ma’am. She’s just glad she could help.”
“As am I. Please tell her so for me, if you would.”
“Yes, Professor, I will.” Marigold pulled a chair next to the bed. “All of your students are anxious for your recovery.”
“Bless them,” Imogen Currier breathed. “Such wonderfully loyal girls. And brilliant. Especially you and Miss Rautencranz.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Marigold accepted her share of the compliment. “I hope you understand my commitment to bringing your niece’s murderer to justice.”
“Understand it? I agree with it,” the professor declared.
Marigold began with a rather round-about approach, easing her way into the professor’s confidence.
“In that vein, I’m trying to find out all the information I can about Wilkie Valentine—and we don’t have much time.
He left Boston on the Cunard liner Ultonia last Thursday, and there is only a day or so left—at best—before the ship docks in Liverpool and the authorities’ ability to have him taken into custody will be gone. ”
“I see.” The professor turned her face away, as she had before—in the carriage when they had traveled to Dedham to identify Olivia’s body. And almost every time Wilkie Valentine’s name had come up.
Marigold had once thought it was because Professor Currier was trying to conceal something she had done. And now she was not sure what it meant—only that it was important. “I sense you have a very great aversion to Mr. Valentine, Professor—with good reason, I agree.”
“Horrible, terrible boy.”
Marigold also noted that she had based her own impression of Wilkie Valentine as a very young man of a similar age to Olivia, on the professor’s labeling him as such. “The ticket that we found for Wilkie Valentine amongst Olivia’s possessions listed his age as thirty-two—hardly a boy.”
“Really?” The professor pulled a face. “He was certainly not that old—he was … Oh.” Her brows had risen, as if she had come to some new realization. “I suppose he was.”
“So, you had met him—enough to gauge his age?”
“I suppose.” She turned her face away again.
Marigold changed tack—for now. “You believe Wilkie Valentine killed Olivia?”
“I can’t think of anyone else who might want to do away with her. She was an angel.” Imogen Currier dabbed at her eyes. “A feisty, sometimes argumentative, free-thinking angel, but an angel all the same. So passionate. So articulate.”
“I am sorry I never got to meet her,” Marigold said with sincerity. “She seems just the type of girl I would adore having as a friend.”
“Oh, yes,” the professor agreed. “You would have liked her—and she you.”
Marigold steered the conversation back to less sentimental topics. “What I can’t understand is how did this Wilkie Valentine come to meet her at all—he doesn’t seem the sort of person who would come to one of her lectures?”
Imogen Currier sighed heavily. “I didn’t want to say—we didn’t want to say. But it’s all my fault.”
Marigold resisted the impulse to reassure her. “How so?”
“Because I didn’t understand he was a threat,” the professor qualified. “I dismissed him—quite literally showed him the door. I didn’t think he would go to such lengths. That he would use her to threaten me—us.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“My sister and I. Although, I can’t think that he understood Olivia was my niece—I never told him so. Although upon reflection, perhaps I should have.”
Marigold could not follow what, to her, appeared to be an ungainly leap of logic on the professor’s part. “What should you have told him?”
“That Olivia was my niece. It might have made some difference. But he was a Virginian—I suppose they had different ideas in the south.”
“What kind of different ideas?”
“About cousins!” Professor Currier closed her eyes again. “But to be honest, I suppose he was bent on revenge any way he could get it.”
Marigold felt that skittering of awareness, like an alarm across her skin. “Revenge?”
“For what had happened to him, I suppose.” Professor Currier leaned back into her pillow and breathed deeply, as if she were gathering her strength. “We’d kept it a secret for so long—because there was no real reason not to. But I suppose it will all come out now.”
Marigold took her own measured, tense breath. “What will come out?”
“Wilkie Valentine thought I was his mother,” she said simply.
Marigold did not know when she had been more shocked.
Professor Imogen Currier hardly seemed the type of woman to have—done what?
Had a secret love affair that had resulted in a child?
Like Eliza, Marigold frankly didn’t think the professor was the kind of woman who was romantically interested in men.
“His mother?” Marigold finally prompted.
“To be clear, I am not.” Professor Currier met Marigold’s eye with a weary sort of frankness—but frankness, nonetheless.
“And I do not say that because I am ashamed, or any such nonsense, but simply because it is not true. The truth is that he is the natural son of my sister, Lucinda Currier. And she, I was told by the Alms House Hospital in Richmond, passed away at his birth, leaving the orphan child. Puerperal fever,” she said as an explanation to Dr. Barker, who had been silent the whole time.
“Sepsis due to streptococcal infection,” Dr. Barker elaborated. “Unfortunately, a fairly common occurrence after childbirth in prior days. You have my condolences.”
“Thank you,” Professor Currier acknowledged.
“But it was many years ago—thirty-two to be exact, now that I’ve stopped to count.
My sister had gone away suddenly some months before—left us, much like we thought Olivia had.
Perhaps that was what delayed us taking any action to recover Olivia—the stunning feeling of history repeating itself.
” Her sigh was full of self-blame. “But Lucinda’s boy child had already been taken into an orphanage by the time we—my sister Almira and I—were informed of his birth.
I sent money for his care—once I knew of both Lucinda’s death and of the infant’s existence.
But by the time I made it down to Richmond—that was where she had gone, though we never learned why—the child had already been adopted by a prominent local family, the Valentines.
I thought it best to let be—he was far better off, I thought, with such a family.
” She closed her eyes and leaned back into the pillows as if exhausted by her story. “Clearly, I was wrong.”
“You were not wrong, Imogen,” Dr. Barker said. “Not at all.”
“I tried to tell him about her—she was such a lovely girl, Lucinda—since he was so insistent and demanding. But he didn’t want to listen to what he termed a conveniently made-up story. He had already made up his mind to blame me.”
“So, he came to you first?” Marigold had assumed Valentine’s entire focus had been on Olivia.
“He did,” Professor Currier confirmed, “with his accusations and his anger. When I told him about Lucinda, he didn’t believe me.
But he went away, at least. Or so I thought.
Until he reappeared, courting Olivia. But I didn’t realize it was he—Olivia didn’t tell us her admirer’s name at first, just said there was a fellow romancing her, and that she couldn’t seem to discourage him.
” She shook her head as if she might reorder her thoughts.
“I don’t know how he found her—I can only assume he saw her with me—and assumed the worst, the way some people do. Like that wretched tabloid.”
“Oh, I am sorry. I had hoped you hadn’t seen the paper.” Marigold exchanged glances with Dr. Barker, wondering if the doctor thought that, with that information, the professor’s mistake with her medication was far less easily dismissed as accidental. “Did you read the article?”
“Yes,” the professor confirmed. “That was what sent me to my medicine.”
Dr. Barker asserted herself into the conversation without any prompting from Marigold. “And you’re sure you didn’t make a mistake with the medicine, Imogen? You weren’t so upset that you perhaps took too much?”
Professor Currier frowned in confusion. “Do you mean that I mistook the dose because I was upset, or that I—” She gasped. “—that I purposefully took the wrong dose?”
“You have been under a grave strain, Imogen,” Dr. Barker said quietly. “This latest outrage—”
“Was a fresh insult, yes. And hurtful—entirely so. And I was uncommonly upset—upset enough to want to take the medicine so I might deal with the consequences, so I might speak to Julia and see what might be done to preserve the reputation of the college. I am certainly not the first female professor to be accused of inappropriate or unnatural conduct with a student—”
“Nothing unnatural about it,” the doctor said quietly before she continued. “And you won’t be the last,” she added without much consolation. “It could have been any one of us.”
Marigold was struck by a number of thoughts at once.
Firstly, that if Professor Currier had neither taken the extra dose on purpose nor been unmindful of how much she had taken, then another factor—or malefactor—was at play here. And poison was, generally speaking, a woman’s weapon.