Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  He blinked at her, apparently confounded by her zeal, and followed her when she walked to the rear of the ship and leaned over the taffrail.

  “Careful, now!” he said.

  “Have you ever seen anyone drown?”

  “Aye, too many to count.”

  “That’s horrible!” she said, showing enough bright excitement that the sailor seemed proud, even privileged to have witnessed such a quantity of drownings.

  His name was Mr. Knacker. He’d been sailing all his life. “Born at sea,” he insisted, and she took him at his word. They continued this way for many minutes, Molly asking questions and delighting in the answers, Mr. Knacker—clearly basking in her lubberly attention—speaking, very sagely, like the saltiest of mariners. He neglected the mainsail for so long that the captain himself strode from the bow, brought Mr. Knacker to his wits again with nothing but a scowl, and looked at Molly as if he’d caught her drilling holes through the ship.

  Captain Veer was rangy but immensely broad shouldered. His hair was long and black, and though his clothes were drab and functional—the same as those of the crew—he projected his command with tense contradiction: he was furious but calm, casual but grave.

  “Stay in the cabin with your husband till the seas quiet down.”

  She pulled the windblown hair out of her mouth and said, “I’m not afraid, sir. I’d rather stay and watch.”

  Captain Veer stepped toward her as if he meant to shove her over.

  “You imperil us all when you interfere with discipline,” he said. “I’ll have you carried like a sack unless you get yourself below.”

  And yet he said it with respect, not at all like Mrs. Wickware threatening her with Jeremy, and she decided not to rankle him, at least not on purpose.

  “Thank you for talking to me!” she called to Mr. Knacker at the mainmast.

  His eyes looked to Molly and the captain simultaneously, divergent in their motions till they locked on her alone. “You’re welcome, ma’am,” he shouted with an unchecked smile. “The pleasure was mine entire!”

  It was difficult to tell which of the men was more surprised: Mr. Knacker, who had praised her for distracting him from duty, or Captain Veer, who seemed to view Molly as a worker of bewitchment.

  And so it went for several weeks as Molly charmed the crew and vexed Captain Veer. She was an hourly distraction with her neverending questions, an obstacle to work as she explored the Cleaver’s deck, and the only pair of breasts for several hundred miles. The men were impressed with Molly’s fearlessness and balance—at least a quarter of the crew had complimented her sea legs—and they enjoyed her constant awe at things they took for granted. Reef knots. Holystones. Meteors and moon dogs. The privy hole that fed directly into the sea.

  This morning they had called her up to see a flock of bird crabs. These were delicacies at sea and difficult to catch, but they were drawn to passing ships and often tangled in the rigging. They were pearly gray and small, the size of Molly’s palm, with membranous wings that folded into their shells beneath the water. In flight they had the quality of pale, peculiar bats, fluttery and quick and comically erratic. Without being asked, she joined several sailors who were climbing up to catch them.

  When she reached the top of the mainmast, she paused to view the ship a hundred feet below. There was no trace of land. Everything was water and the sky, with its wavy streaks of herringbone cloud, was a white-capped mirror of the ocean far below. It was blue upon blue and she was floating in the middle. There were even two suns, one real and one reflected, and the ship seemed to hover in a universal sphere.

  The Cleaver softly rolled, the deck slipped away, and she was straight above the water, higher than the bell of Elmcross Church. Molly stretched and pulled a crab off the uppermost stay, careful of its thin but razor-sharp pincers.

  “Break its wings and drop it down!” a brawny midshipman hollered from below.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said to the first, averting her eyes as she wounded it, but soon she was snapping their wings and dropping them down as if she’d done it all her life. She easily outpaced the sailor on the foremast, much to the amusement of the men upon the deck.

  A crab fluttered past her hair, plucking several strands before clinging to the yardarm far to the left where Molly couldn’t reach it from the mast. It was the plumpest she had seen and couldn’t be ignored. She lay out lengthwise, straddling the yard, pretending it was nothing but a branch above a pond.

  “Leave it be!” yelled a sailor underneath her at the rail, and yet he sounded halfhearted, as if he hoped to see her try.

  Bellying along was awkward in her skirts. She would have hiked them up if not for all the men.

  “Kraken’s balls, get down from there!” Captain Veer yelled, having emerged from his cabin to discover her aloft.

  In her startlement, she snatched the crab without really looking. Its pincer caught her thumb, slicing through the nail. Molly yelped and shook it off, the crab fluttered down, and then she tumbled off the yard and dangled by her hands. Blood made her grip dangerously slick. A fat gust of wind pressed the canvas to her body, threatening to bump her through the air like a ball.

  Men shouted from below with contradictory advice. Molly scowled at her hands, commanding them to hold. Her bloody palm was slipping, so she swung herself hard toward the rope that ran between the mainsail and the foremast, high to low.

  For a moment she was airborne, loose above the deck—a body in the wind between the broad white sails. She hooked the tether with her elbow and clamped on tight. Once she had a grip, she crossed her ankles over the stay and shimmied down, moving backward, hanging under like a sloth until she finally reached the foremast top and landed on the platform. From there the climb was simple, little harder than a ladder, and she snatched a final crab before she jumped on deck, bloody but intact, in front of Captain Veer.

  She offered him the crab. He was tauter than the rigging and refused to take the gift. His eyes were black. He stared at her with murderous composure.

  “Good morning, sir,” she said.

  The crew turned to wood. Captain Veer didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. The only part of him that moved was his scraggly dark hair.

  “I’ll go down to the cabin where I belong,” Molly said.

  Was it guilt that made her say it, or the captain’s angry silence? Either way, she felt a mutinous desire to retract it, to climb another mast and see if he would shout.

  Instead she dropped the crab and watched it flutter, briefly free, before it whirled toward the sails and tangled in the lines again. She looked at every sailor as she walked to the companionway but none of them, not even Mr. Knacker, raised his face to acknowledge her in front of Captain Veer. She sucked her thumb going down—it was bleeding unabated—and the gloom below deck was dungeonlike and heavy.

  There was one other paying passenger aside from Molly and her brother: a chandler, who had spent the early days of the trip nearly as seasick as Nicholas. His name was Mr. Fen and he was taking his candle-making business to Floria, where materials were cheaper and demand was on the rise. Molly guessed that he was fifty. He had a suety complexion with a faintly moistened sheen, and he paid the captain handsomely for fresh-laid eggs, which he liked to suck raw by puncturing the shells. He was not so much shy as purposefully withdrawn, keeping to his books and rarely leaving his own private cabin.

  Molly had engaged him with her usual tenacity. He humored her but asked more questions than he answered. This morning he lay in a hammock with a lantern overhead. The hammock and the lantern swayed together with the ship so that the light was always falling on his favorite book of ballads.

  “I’ve done it again,” she told him now, sitting on his traveling chest, and gave him an account of her adventure with the crabs.

  Mr. Fen didn’t speak until she finished. He stepped out of the hammock, leaving his book behind him, and approached her with an outstretched hand.

  “Let me see yo
ur thumb,” he said.

  Mr. Fen examined it, holding at the joint and squinting at the crab-cut nail. He guided her off the chest, opened the lid, and pulled out a tiny bottle of spirits.

  “Be brave and this will cleanse it,” he said, addressing her, she felt, the way he might address a toddler. Molly looked away, determined not to wince. He popped the cork and poured. It felt like boiling water. Mr. Fen watched her face instead of her injured thumb. She ground her other hand’s knuckles on the corner of the chest, diverting her attention till the sting began to fade. He corked the bottle, blew gently on her thumb to dry it off, and wrapped the wound neatly with a small strip of cloth.

  “Thank you,” Molly said.

  Mr. Fen smiled. He put the bottle away and said, “You must be more careful. Other pains are far more difficult to soothe.”

  “So is the captain’s temper.”

  “You always have a friend here below,” he assured her.

  “I’m glad of your companionship with Jacob so terribly ill.”

  Mr. Fen returned to his hammock, opening his book but keeping his attention courteously on Molly. “Is he improving?”

  “No,” she said, trying not to twitch or look away. “I fear he won’t recover for the duration of the trip. He has always been prone to sickness.”

  “It was kind of you to marry him,” Mr. Fen said, glancing at her hand, which was bare of any ring.

  “We were destitute in Umber,” Molly said, as if confessing. “But Jacob has excellent prospects in Grayport. Please forgive me—I should go to him now. Thank you for your care.”

  Mr. Fen nodded and reclined to read his book. The lantern just above him, momentarily erratic, bleached his face while the rest of him was darkened by the shadow.

  She left him there and continued back to her own cabin, telling herself she needed more rehearsal for her lies.

  Nicholas lay in his cot. His hair was slicked against his brow and he was dressed, beneath a blanket, in a badly ripened shift. The sea had worn him out and brought on the grippe, and now his fevers left him damp. Nicholas had packed in haste and traveled very light; aside from a pair of cloaks, extra stockings, and two spare shifts, they had only what they’d worn the day of their escape. The trunk contained little else—a medical book; the pistol; gold and silver coins—so she washed and dried his shifts as quickly as she could, barely keeping up with Nicholas’s sweats.

  Other than this and begging him to eat, there was nothing to do but wipe his forehead, straighten his blanket, and keep him company when he was conscious enough to notice. She did so now, cleaning his face with a rag and meeting his filmy eyes. He recognized her still—she felt relief at this whenever he awoke—but he lacked the strength and will to speak above a whisper.

  She stood and held his hand—it felt as pitiful and flimsy as a bird crab’s wing—and talked about her derring-do high above the deck. The stories of her day were all that seemed to cheer him, and it was this, more than boredom, that encouraged her to venture on deck every morning.

  Whenever she was finished and had nothing left to tell, she talked about the life that lay ahead of them in Grayport.

  “We’ll have a house in the city, and every day I’ll walk to the market and buy something new,” she said, imagining a continent of unfamiliar foods. “We’ll explore every street and visit every shop, and in the afternoons and evenings we can entertain our friends. We’ll have very many friends, a whole second family. When we tire of the city, we’ll go to a house in the country.”

  “It is wilderness,” he murmured, “outside the city.”

  “We’ll meet the Elkinaki—they’ve been friendly to the Florians—and after visiting their village, we’ll return to the city and tell our friends of our adventures. Won’t they be amazed! They’ll beg to hear it all.”

  He fluttered forth a smile but the effort wore him out, and then he sighed and shut his eyes, falling heavily asleep. Molly checked his pulse to see that it was moving and her own strong pulse nearly drowned it out. She thought again of Grayport, imagining their house—a drawing room with rosy friends and curious liqueurs—but the vision felt puerile. What if Nicholas died? She might find herself in Floria alone, and what then? How would she survive without her brother to rely on?

  * * *

  Mr. Fen accompanied Molly on deck the following day. She had invited him out of habit, having done so daily the entire previous week, but she regretted it at once when he happily accepted. Disinviting him would only serve to deepen his suspicion, so she walked with him at length and answered all his questions.

  “What are your husband’s prospects?” he asked her near the bow. A dense bank of fog was approaching from the west and Molly paused to view it, sweating in the breeze. The warmth that pressed around them seemed to issue from the fog but she feared her perspiration would be misconstrued as stress. “Forgive me,” he continued, “if I overstep my bounds.”

  “Not at all,” Molly said. “I must admit, Jacob’s prospects are vague. His education is extraordinary—I have never known a man more thoroughly developed—but he has yet to choose a path from the many at his feet.”

  “An autodidact,” Mr. Fen said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He has educated himself.”

  “Why do you think—”

  “I apologize,” he said, “if I assumed too much. A graceless tendency of mine. I remembered that you told me you were destitute in Umber and assumed he lacked for proper schooling.”

  “Oh, I see,” Molly said, dripping more profusely. A smell of vegetation thickened in the air as if the fog, ever closer, were the steam of heated plants. “He was born amid wealth and lacked for nothing in his youth, but his father ruined himself in business and—I am ashamed to say it—took his own life when Jacob was fifteen. He and his mother lived as well as they could, but they were forced to sell most of their belongings to escape a growing avalanche of debt. She died last year.”

  Molly bowed her head, pausing in memoriam.

  “I’m an autodidact,” she said with extra levity, as if the previous subject had depressed her and she meant to perk herself up. “You may have noticed I am often posing questions to the crew.”

  “That I have,” said Mr. Fen, pivoting to face her, close enough to give their talk an intimate appearance. “You are wonderfully precocious.”

  “Mr. Knacker,” Molly said, relieved to find the wall-eyed sailor walking by. “What is the curious fogbank coming at the ship?”

  Mr. Knacker walked up and bobbed with nervous pleasure. He and the crew had grown enamored of Molly’s high jinks and chatter, but Mr. Fen had put a damper on her spirits that morning, acting like a chaperone and hogging her attention. She had felt the men’s resentment when he led her by the arm. Even worse, Mr. Fen had seemed offended by their squalor, steering her away whenever they were near.

  Mr. Knacker looked affectionately at Molly while keeping his colder, squintier eye directed at Mr. Fen. “That is waterbreath,” he said. “Proof that we have reached the Serpentine Current.”

  He had described the current before: a potent flow of water streaming from the south, dividing the Eccentric Ocean halfway from Bruntland to Floria. Its vigor slowed ships, sometimes sending them a week off course. The current teemed with sea life pulled from the equator and its tropical heat was infamous for breeding vivid weather.

  Molly turned to look and said, “The river in the sea.”

  “Aye,” said Mr. Knacker. “Soon the water will be greener and the ship will start to drift. Our only way through is spreading sail and touching wood.”

  “Waterbreath,” she said, enchanted by the novelty.

  “A sailor’s word for fog,” mumbled Mr. Fen, who started walking off as if expecting her to follow.

  “That it ain’t,” Mr. Knacker said exclusively to Molly. “It is breezes made of water, difficult to breathe. You might be scared of it at first because it feels like you’re drowning, but it rarely lasts a day and few of us succu
mb.”

  Mr. Fen returned to her side. He put his hand behind her waist and said, “He’s trying to impress you with his tales and superstitions. There is no cause for worry.”

  Molly felt a quiver of revulsion up her spine.

  “It wasn’t my aim to worry you, Mrs. Smith,” said Mr. Knacker.

  “I’m not afraid of waterbreath, however thick it comes!” she said, consoled by Mr. Knacker’s friendly reassurance.

  “Molly Smith is scared of nothing,” said the grim second mate, descending from the foremast and landing with a thud. He had scars instead of wrinkles, and a beard like dirty snow. “It’s Mr. Fen you’ve worried,” he assured Mr. Knacker. “Took the man weeks to poke his head above deck.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Mr. Fen began.

  “Acts as if he owns her now,” the second mate continued. “Mrs. Smith is one of us. Go pour a fucking candle.”

  “Come,” said Mr. Fen, and squeezed Molly’s arm.

  “I’ll stay and watch the fog,” she said, pulling from his grip.

  Mr. Fen squared his jaw as much as he was able, but his softness and his petulance were rather too effete.

  “I’ll see you below,” he said to Molly, marching off with resolute strides.

  “You won’t see a thing,” the second mate called, “once the ghost fog surrounds us!”

  Much of the crew began to laugh. Molly couldn’t help but join them.

  * * *

  But she did grow alarmed when the waterbreath arrived. She stood with Mr. Knacker at the bow to watch it come. The fog approached the Cleaver like a tidal wave, as wide as she could see from starboard to port—pale, faintly blue, and ominously silent.

  They had encountered fog before and even the denser banks thinned once the ship was moving through, but the waterbreath intensified and utterly engulfed them. Molly felt as if a saturated bag were on her head. She gasped and couldn’t breathe, which made her heart begin to race, which made her pant and hyperventilate and panic even more. Mr. Knacker and the second mate were hazy at her side. The sails disappeared. She couldn’t see her feet. Captain Veer shouted orders from behind her on the forecastle but his voice was oddly muted in the hissing of the mist.