“Upon my very soul, Lucile! All men are evil save your blessed brother who has been inoculated by God himself?” Clara shook her head with undisguised rancour. “And I thought the scriptures taught you always to seek good in others.”
“The scriptures, dear Clara, have taught me to beware the iniquity of men…a lesson those five girls did not learn from us as they were growing up. And as a result, take note of all the misfortune that has befallen them.” Lucile cast a tender glance at Maggie. “Poor, poor Maggie, falling in love with her very own brother. And Molly, giving her heart to a young man with only one purpose to his pursuit. And what has happened to Jane is all but unspeakable!”
Clara laughed ruefully. “Yet Ruth, who follows in the footsteps of her aunt, who will have truck with no man, succeeds owing to admirable forbearance. Pooh and pho, Lucile! How tidy is your view of that cursed gender and how wise it be to avoid all intercourse with its constituents!”
“Clara, I sought long ago a man who would love me and uplift me. Finding no such creature over the long course of time, I abandoned the search. Ruth has done better for herself by never having looked.”
In the next moment that very referent came into the little room where Maggie slept and where Maggie’s mother and Ruth’s aunt believed they had been speaking without audit. Yet Ruth had been standing just outside the chamber door and had heard all.
Her appearance drew startled gasps from the two older women. One side of Ruth’s face was chafed to a state of rubicund rawness, beads of bright blood bubbling up in spots where the upper layer of skin had been fully abraded away. “Oh my dear!” cried Lucile, going to her adopted niece. “Pray tell us what has happened!”
Ruth spoke without emotion: “You say I have never sought a man to whom to affix my heart for reason of mistrusting and denigrating the whole species. That has never been true, my aunt. I did once meet a man who could be upheld as exemplar of his sex, but he is now dead and gone, perished by his own hand. And there are other men, I am certain, of whom much good can be said. It is merely the absence of propitious circumstance that has kept them from society with my sisters.”
“Speak to me, dear girl,” said Miss Mobry. “Was it one of those three who did this?”
“I must correct you, Auntie. ‘Those three’ are now become ‘those two,’ for I have just learnt from Holborne that Tom Catts is dead.”
“Dead?” Clara Barton had sprung up from her chair upon hearing the word.
“Someone has put a fatal bullet into him. I must go and find Jane to tell her. She should know that the man who has hurt her will never do so again. Would that it did not grieve her so to learn the identity of the one suspected of having done the deed.”
Now came a voice that had previously been silent. It derived from the bed. It recited a rhyme, paraphrased for a purpose:
“Five little kittens, standing in a row.
See them bow to the little girls so.
They run to the left. They run to the right.
They stand and stretch in the bright sunlight.
Along comes a dog, looking for some fun.
Tom Cat is dead and can no longer run.”
Maggie opened her eyes. “I don’t fancy the dog was looking for fun, though. I think he was seeking revenge.” Maggie rose up. The damp cloth fell away from her brow. Her eyes were sharp and there was the gleam of strong purpose in her gaze. “I wish to come with you, Ruth. I have an idea I wish to put to all of you: I’d like us to take Higgins to my uncle’s cottage on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales and hide him there.”
Ruth went to the bed and took both of Maggie’s hands into her own. “It has yet to be decided just what we shall do with Lyle, but I would like to say this withaclass="underline" that your willingness to help her brother will be a great boon and comfort to our sister Jane.”
Miss Mobry shook her head. “Maggie Barton, I can scarcely believe it. That you should be willing to put your future liberty, perhaps even your very life, in jeopardy to assist a man who has had no match in all of Lancashire for ignominy of reputation! Lyle Higgins, who now enters himself into the chronicles of male moral malignancy through this culminant act of degeneracy: the premeditated, gelid-blooded slaughter of another human being — this is the man you wish to help? I must sit down. My legs are weak.”
Lucile Mobry dropped herself to the bed, where she sate in awkward repose, her head moving slowly back and forth like something mechanical that was retarding itself to a state of total motionlessness.
Clara Barton was shaking her head as well. “Maggie, you have made especial effort not to forgive Michael Osborne for defects of character, which you were always eager to catalogue with the most complacent glee. You refused to absolve him of his own act of violence, to pardon him for any of those failings which led him to it, refused to help me balm the pain that put him in such a bad way. And now you wake from your trance and are ready and willing to aid and abet and secrete this other man who has killed for no reason but the pure lust to kill!”
Maggie rose up in anger. “That is a foul and filthy falsehood! What Higgins did he did from love for his sister!”
Maggie’s sudden outburst drew an equally sharp rejoinder from Clara, who could not hide the pain which brittled her words: “And Michael Osborne did what he did from love for his daughter!”
The room rang with the echo of Clara Barton’s eruption. Maggie, her hands now free of Ruth’s clasp, sought her mother’s fingers to intertwine.
“Don’t you see?” wept Clara. “How can you not see?”
And Maggie responded, her eyes brimming with fresh tears, “Yet I do, Mamma. Now I do.”
She bowed her head. When a moment later it uprose, Maggie fastened her filmy gaze upon the broken lineaments of her mother’s anguish-darkened countenance. “Mamma, take Michael Osborne to Anglesey — to Uncle Whitman’s cottage by the sea. Jane and I will do likewise with Lyle. We cannot go together, for it isn’t safe that way, but we will all be there in three days’ time. I know not what the future holds for any of us, but at least we shall face it with a commonality of strength and resolve.”
“And what of Molly?” asked Clara.
“It remains to be seen,” said Ruth, “if Molly Osborne can find it within her heart to forgive her father.”
Now Maggie looked at Lucile Mobry, who seemed a fading shadow in the room of staunch women. She said to her, “Every man is drowning, Miss Mobry — slowly, quickly, in one way or another; you are right. But it is our charge as women to throw out the lifeline. Some men will refuse our help. Others will try to pull us down with them. Still others will blame us for their foundering. But still we must take up the burden of their recovery and ultimate redemption. It is one of the reasons God has put us upon this spinning coil. This I now believe.” And then, as she betook herself from the bed, she said, “Mamma, my only regret in rising from this bed is losing the chance to have you attend me for a change. But I do fancy that from now on we will make it our business to take care of one another in equal measure. Come, Ruth. We haven’t much time, and we must first see to your face.”