Chapter 36
“In order that she may give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.”
Margaret Fuller
But loving someone wasn’t the same thing as wanting to get married or set up housekeeping together.
No matter how much Marigold loved him—and judging from the painful lump in her throat, she loved him quite a lot—she did not want to marry him.
Not now, when her dreams seemed closer than ever to becoming a reality.
If she wrote up the story of the Lake Waban murder for The Argosy, she might raise all the needed funds for her summer in Kefalonia.
And if she returned her focus to her studies and excelled, in the spring she might apply for a scholarship through the American School for Classical Studies in Athens, which might give her enough to excavate in some small style—a second-class ticket on one of the better ocean liners, at the very least, instead of in steerage with her trunks.
It was a heady thought.
Heady and powerful enough to explain to him.
But she didn’t have to—Cab had somehow followed her silent train of thought. “I understand you’re being considered to be conferred with your master’s degree in the spring, as well as your bachelor’s at the end of this term? You’re to be congratulated. What a coup.”
“Yes, thank you,” she acknowledged politely. One didn’t want to make too much of oneself. “But only if I manage to pull this semester out of the ash can after all this bumbling about instead of studying.”
“Somehow I feel you’ll be able to put all this ‘bumbling about,’ as you call it, to good use. The Argosy will surely print the next installment of Miss Marigold Manners’s adventures.”
Marigold could not tell if she was being reprimanded or praised. “Is that how you think of them, these appalling segues we take into murder?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “That is how I think of all the things that you do—adventures. One never knows what is going to happen with you around, Marigold. But one knows that one is never going to be bored.”
There was something sadly distancing in his use of “one,” as if he no longer wanted to use the very personal “I.”
“One lives to entertain.”
“That I will dispute—I think you live to live.” He put paid to her theory of vocabulary. But he looked away from her, out over the shimmering, dimming lake, as if keeping up a close inspection were too hard. “It is one of the things I admire most about you.”
“You are very generous.” She took the opportunity to look at him—at the chiseled, reliable, dear, dear profile of this singular man. “It is one of the things I admire about you.”
“So here we sit.” He rubbed her shoulders a little in friendly companionship. “A mutual admiration society of two.”
“Here we sit.” Marigold realized the jittery sensations had retreated under the warmth of Cab’s presence. “Thank you for sitting with me.”
“I’ll sit with you any time. For as long as you like.”
“I like it very much.” She let her head rest on his shoulder. Lightly. Just this once.
Marigold let her eyes close in comfort and ease and exhaustion. She gave herself the indulgence of not thinking for a moment. Just a moment. A nice long moment.
The kind of moment a person might think they wanted to make last forever.
But Marigold wasn’t a forever kind of person.
Forever would preclude so many other things she wanted and needed to do.
Like find Aggie and Ethyl again and thank them, most profoundly.
And hug Miss Burke until the little woman’s cheeks turned pink with embarrassment.
And pledge to President Irvine that she would devote herself to resurrecting her academic reputation.
And check on how Professor Currier was recovering.
And finish that theme on the influence of Lucretius’s Epicurean thought—the natural and rational imperative to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in a person’s life—as the foundation and philosophy of America as a country.
And make sure Wilkie Valentine was convicted of murder.
“Marigold? Are you warm enough?”
“Yes,” she roused herself to answer.
“You shivered,” he observed. “You are still shivering.”
“I’m only thinking.”
He did not ask what she was thinking about. He just kept his arm around her shoulder and kept up his careful, soothing rubbing of her upper arm.
But she told him anyway. “I was thinking that women very often get killed because they are trying to be likable. I am sure Olivia Thayer said she would go for a walk with Wilkie Valentine because she wanted to be polite and likable, even while she wanted nothing more to do with him. My first instinct was that as well—appeasement rather than anger. It is the paradox of our lives. The moment we do something to make ourselves unlikable—the moment Olivia Thayer rejected Wilkie Valentine’s advances, however politely, was the moment she became endangered. ”
Marigold hugged her knees to her chest in an effort to stop the tremors of horror and frustration from working their way through her body.
“I’m sure she kept trying to be polite the whole time he was strong-arming her down to the lake.
I’m sure she did. Because what choice did she have?
What choice do any of us have in this very real world we live in?
Even here in this place that is supposed to be set apart from the cares of the world—set apart specifically so we may learn away from other cares—those cares never go away.
“I’ve often said that this world is not made for us, for women like me, so we must keep trying to make it over where and when we can, but today I feel as if we can do no such thing.
That we must—” She threw up her hands in frustration.
“Are we all to go about carrying pistols like gunslingers? Are we to become as violent and despicable as those who would be violent and despicable toward us? Must we embrace wickedness?”
“I don’t know,” was Cab’s answer. “But I for one am very glad you had that hatpin in place of a six-shooter, for it proved itself just as effective.”
“My hand still hurts from jabbing it in,” she mused before she added, “as well it should, I suppose. One ought to feel something when one has stabbed someone in the heart.”
“Marigold.” Cab gently turned her chin toward him. “He was a very bad man who needed stabbing.”
“Yes. Yes, he did,” she finally agreed. “Thank you for that, Cab.”
“You are quite welcome. It is the least I could do. I can’t help feeling I should have done more.”
“How?” Marigold laughed her disagreement. “You did everything I asked of you.”
“I should have realized that the moment you began investigating the girl and her murder, you would be in danger. That the homicidal impulse, as my readings so presciently taught me, would inevitably turn upon you.”
“I should have realized that too,” Marigold admitted. “Vanity, I suppose was my undoing. I liked having someone flatter me and take my opinions seriously—or at least appear to take them seriously. Perhaps I should have known that would turn out to be nothing but a ruse?”
“I will always take your opinions seriously, Marigold. Call upon me anytime you have something of import to discuss.”
“I’ll do that.” She took in a deep breath. Their moment was almost over. Just as it should be.
Marigold started to rise and Cab did so too, reaching to pull her up at his side.
“Marigold. I hope you know … This is an awful time because you’ve been through such a lot today, but I want you to know that my offer—” He cleared his throat.
“My proposal of marriage—in case you might think I might be speaking of something else—still stands. I am utterly mad about you, Marigold, and I always will be.”
“Thank you. I love you too.” Marigold immediately caught herself being polite and likable—not only because that was what Cab deserved, but because that was what she felt she had to do or appear ungrateful.
She firmed her resolve. “However comforting the idea of being with you—and it is very comforting at this moment—this is an awful time, to say the least. I killed a man. And that is not something I will ever take lightly. I imagine I will take it with me always, this token of my failure to see past my own nose.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me,” she countered. “Even if I did marry you.” She hesitated.
“But—” he finished.
“But why does it always have to be marriage? Why can we not just be … together for each other? Why must I subject myself to this legal lessening? Why do people expect—expect!—me to love you on your terms, and castigate me for wanting to love you on my terms?”
“I … I don’t know.” He reached for her hand. “All I know is that I am glad that you do love me.”
“I always have.” And the moment she said it, she knew it was true—that all the years she had pretended to ignore him, all the pride that had kept her from enjoying him, were nothing but an excuse she had made to hold that love at bay.
Because she knew, deep down, that as much as she loved him, she loved herself, her ambitions, and her very personhood more. “But—”
“You don’t have to explain.” Cab shook his head to stop her. “I understand, I do.”
He was generosity itself. “Yes, you’re prepared to be all noble and fine—and to let me go. Which is not what I want. I want you to be with me on my terms, openly and joyfully and—”
“And outside the law?” he finished.
“Yes.” Marigold would not apologize for her want. “What good does the law do me? I don’t have any legal rights as a person. Only as a widow, which I do not at all want to be.”
“But just to be together …” He shook his head. “I can’t do that. I am …” He struggled to find the right words. “… a man of the law. I am expected to live within the framework of the—”
“The society that money and exclusive education and the hidebound opinions of Puritans have built?” Marigold finished, not without some bitterness.
“Such is our world, Marigold,” Cab reminded her.
“And don’t I know it.” She felt like stamping her foot in frustration, so put out was she. But she was not put out with Cab. It was not his fault the world was the way it was. “I am sorry to vent my spleen on you, Cab. I know you don’t deserve it.”
He chuckled mirthlessly. “What do I deserve?”
“You told me I deserved to be happy,” Marigold answered. “Well, so do you. And since I, with my flouting of the conventions you hold so dear, cannot make you happy, I suppose I must let you go to be happy with some other.”
“It’s impossible, Marigold.” He was quietly emphatic. “It’s always been you. And I fear it always will be.”
There it was, so casually laid between then. So fragile. Like a bomb, the fear.
But as there was nothing she might do to defuse it, she had to let it go.
“Come, it is time for me to resume being a college girl and nothing but. Thank you,” she said again as she linked her arm with his to walk back to the sheltering hulk of College Hall.
“You can help me begin—you’ve a Harvard degree or two—what do you think of the relationship between Epicurean philosophy and the Jeffersonian ideal of the ‘pursuit of happiness’? ”
He smiled. “I think Jefferson owned a number of copies of De Rerum Natura, both in the original Latin and in translation, so your theory holds a good deal of water.”
“So long as that water does not hold dead girls, I think I shall be very happy.”
“Good.” He smiled down at her. “You do deserve to pursue your own happiness, Marigold. Remember that, always.”