Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  Unger hesitated, waiting for the sheriff to instruct him. Pitt paused, too, until it seemed his curiosity outweighed his reservations and he said, “I’ll be fine. Lock us in and wait in the taproom.”

  Unger eagerly obeyed, his cannonball shoulders sagging in relief. He shut the door and left the hall, using his musket as a walking stick. They listened to it clacking as he tromped downstairs, and then the room fell silent and the men stood alone.

  Pitt took a pistol from the pocket of his coat.

  “There’s a paper in my stocking,” Tom said. “I’m going to get it.”

  He stooped to roll his stocking down before he had permission, stood back up, and held the message out between them. Pitt stretched his arm and took it with his fingertips, apparently afraid the paper was a trick and Tom would try to jump him if he took a step forward. He read the note in three quick glances with a frown.

  “The man with the chipped tooth who talked to Abigail,” Tom said. “His name is Nicholas. He isn’t Molly’s husband. He’s her brother.”

  He told Pitt everything that Molly had divulged. The siblings new to Grayport. Nicholas’s office. John Summer, Molly’s pregnancy, the cabin, and the shot. He didn’t mention Molly’s real last name or General Bell, which were secrets, even now, Pitt could do without.

  The room was bright and frigid, giving Pitt a fierce intensity—a glint like the nickel of the pistol he was holding.

  “Her brother killed her baby and she shot him,” Pitt said. “She floated down the river, started over here in Root, and now he’s risen from the dead, stolen her away, and gotten you arrested so you wouldn’t interfere.”

  “Aye.”

  “And you expect me to believe it,” Pitt said.

  “You already do.”

  Pitt held the paper near the barrel of his gun. “The note says you’re supposed to stay put and keep quiet. You’re telling me to save your own skin.”

  “He doesn’t want her dead,” Tom said. “He wants her gone. If no one took the ferry then they must have gone to Grayport.”

  He took a step forward. Pitt cocked the pistol. Tom reached out and grabbed the barrel in his fist, moving up close until the gun was at his chest.

  “Let me stop him,” Tom said.

  “How?”

  “Sneak me out of Root. If I’m really being watched, no one else can know until I’m well away to Grayport.”

  “And let me explain tomorrow how I let you get away?”

  Pitt ground the muzzle into one of Tom’s buttons, pressing on a bruise underneath the shirt.

  “You can’t do nothing,” Tom said.

  “I can hold you till the circuit judge comes to hold trial. With Molly gone and no real evidence to clear you”—Pitt crushed the note and shoved it into his pocket—“you’re neck deep in horse shit, right where you belong. If a jury finds you guilty, I shouldn’t have trouble buying back the tavern.”

  “God damn it,” Tom said. “That isn’t right.”

  “But it’s legal. Your father didn’t mind making that distinction.”

  “You’d let a killer take Molly just to burn me,” Tom said.

  “Even if your story is true, you’re putting her in danger if you don’t stay here.” Pitt smiled so wickedly it wasn’t like a smile; it was more like an ax cut opening his face. “So tell me,” he said, lowering the pistol. “Where’s the benefit to anybody else if you’re free?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Molly and Nicholas reached Grayport in late afternoon. They entered through the palisade gate, taking the long way around—the outermost road beside the meadows, farms, and marshes—to the harbor with the city just beside them. They had left Shepherd’s Inn shortly after dawn and traveled all day, rarely speaking in the cold. Nicholas had ridden with a pistol in his hand. Molly had considered galloping off and daring him to shoot, but her limbs had lacked the energy for darting into action.

  Now the journey had exhausted him, and Molly grew alert. Nicholas’s cough was grain-dust dry. He’d been forced to hide his pistol once they exited the forest and was quite a ways behind her now, lowering his guard.

  A lamplighter passed, rather early with the daylight lingering around them, and the lamps began to glow in preparation for the dark. Fear of night touched the city. Deadfall, like much of Root’s extraordinary weather, had stayed within the Antler River Valley far behind them, but the temperature was cold enough for nighttime frost. Molly saw a side street open on her right, stretching three or four blocks into the city’s inner maze—one of many they had passed where Nicholas would lose her if she bolted. She turned: he was shivering and slumping in his saddle. Wind billowed through his coat.

  Then they rode around the corner of the rope makers’ storehouse and finally saw the harbor. It defeated her completely.

  She had diverted herself for hours, staying focused on the present—on the weather, on the birds, on her brother’s diminishing strength. Now the present was the fact she had struggled to deny. The falling sun plunged the quarter-mile of docks into cold, heavy shadow. The temperature immediately dropped. Molly sagged. Nicholas rode beside her now, enlivened by the breeze and by the tumult, grim but vigorous, of seamen hard at work to catch the evening tide.

  Molly looked for anyone she knew along the way. She spied an apple cart but didn’t see the vendor they had robbed, and although she had frequented the docks last summer, none of the merchants or the sailors or the yardsmen looked familiar. Molly turned toward the harbor, which had not yet slipped altogether into shade. The water lay black beneath the sun-glittered waves, and while the ships sailing off were brilliant white and gold, those closer to the shore were shadow-bound and stained. The smell of fish was morbid. Filth pervaded the docks and the salt upon the ground was like a rime of dirty frost.

  Molly recognized a ship and read Cleaver on its hull. She stood in her stirrups for a glimpse of Captain Veer or Mr. Knacker, but the deck had been abandoned and the ship looked lifeless. The crew had come to port and flooded into the city. She could only hope that some of them had lingered on the docks.

  They rode for several more minutes before Nicholas dismounted. He tied their horses to a post and offered a hand to guide her down. Molly barely noticed she had gotten off the saddle. She saw another vessel looming up before her. It was a double-masted merchant ship of moderate proportions, smaller than the Cleaver and far more decrepit. Its name, Dick’s Fortune, was nearly illegible under many seasons’ grime. The deck swarmed with sailors who were shouting, swearing, and laughing, a raggedy crew of several dozen souls, tightly packed. She smelled them on the breeze, waxy-eared and sweaty, even now with the unwashed voyage still ahead. Pleasant memories of the Cleaver, of adventure and camaraderie and sailing into life, sank beneath the memory of vile Mr. Fen. She stood as if in waterbreath, laboring for air.

  “You cut it close,” said a man, walking up to meet them.

  He was short, roughly Molly’s height, and muscularly dense. He wore a tarred straw hat and a thick, buttoned coat and she discovered it was he, not the sailors, she had smelled. Nicholas met the man indifferently but Molly backed away. He was eerily familiar—not his tan round face, nor his posture, nor his clothes. His voice, she thought: the phlegmatic rolling of his words.

  “This is Grigory,” Nicholas said. “He will escort you back to Bruntland.”

  “He’s a Maimer,” Molly said. “He wanted to break my teeth!”

  She said it loud enough that people on the dock glanced around. Nicholas took her arm and led her between their horses.

  “I’m sorry it must be him but I am short on reliable men. Grigory will treat you with the utmost care. On my orders,” Nicholas said. “On threat of painful death. He will take you overseas to Frances’s embrace.”

  She looked beyond him to the ship again, its rigging a complexity of coils, nets, and knots, carefully prepared but chaotic from afar.

  “Remember,” Nicholas said. “Frances cannot learn the truth of our estrangement. Tom
Orange’s protection depends on your silence. And do not think his freedom will enable him to act, or that your traveling to Bruntland puts you safely out of reach.”

  Molly’s eyes fought tears, as a jaw fights yawns. “I could scream right now.”

  “And Tom would hang for murder.”

  “How will you prove he’s innocent?” she asked. “You won’t confess.”

  “There’s always someone to blame. Failing that, I have the circuit judge—a man who sent a letter that was grievously misplaced. It contained certain facts he would not wish exposed.”

  “How can I believe you?” Molly said.

  “Because you must.”

  Her aches had grown far too familiar to acknowledge. She was weary from the ride and sore through and through. Someone’s laughter on the dock made her think of Davey Mun. He must have felt this, too: wounded past recovery, acknowledging his fate and sitting down to freeze. Her brother’s explanations flooded over her again, muddied by the many accusations he had made.

  “I love you,” Nicholas said. “I understand if you despise me.”

  He studied her and paused to see what she would say. The child in him showed, along with traces of their father. Molly felt a heart-deep frothing in her blood, a wild blaze of heat consuming everything around her. The glimpse of what he had been—her family and her friend—rippled in her thoughts as if her mind were truly fevered, but her pain went deeper to a vision of herself.

  She didn’t say a word. She didn’t blink or cry. Nicholas lowered his head and Molly walked away, having beaten him at least in the contest of eyes, and took the gangplank to leave her life in Floria behind.

  * * *

  The ship left at dusk with the boisterous sailors hauling lines and spreading sails until they cleared the docks, tacked south-southwest, and made a steady four knots to the middle of the harbor. Molly stood at the taffrail. She had watched her brother shrink as they departed, his dark clothes blending with the shadows onshore until his face became a dot, a tiny fleck of white.

  The sun was dead-fire orange. Molly watched it set and streak the clouds lavender-red. Grayport was lovely in the onset of night, vast and indiscernible aside from all the window lights, each of them distinct but forming, in array, a constellation more beautiful than any in the sky. She thought of the Orange lit at night as she had seen it from the barn, and she could almost taste the warm stuffed apple she had savored—cinnamon and cream, a sweet ball of autumn. Nabby kneading bread dough. Smoakwood fire. The pipe-tobacco sting that seasoned Tom’s tongue.

  But the Orange must have closed: Tom arrested; Bess in tatters from the murder of her father. She herself had disappeared and nobody had followed. Nicholas had dealt with Tom, preventing him from chasing her, and all the rest of Root had blithely let her go. Why had she expected any different? Yet she had. After so much attention had been lavished on her coming, she’d expected more ripples when she finally went away.

  She had left more than ripples in her wake, heaven knew, running off from trouble over and over again. Following her nature, Nicholas had said—but what had been her sin, except escaping from her bonds? Mrs. Wickware and Jeremy, her father and her brother—how could anybody fault her for resisting their control? She had tried to marry John, be a mother, live in Root. She had tried! Or had all of it been different kinds of flight?

  The sky was molten iron, cooling down to black. Somewhere in the dark lay the bodies she was leaving—John, Lem, Davey, maybe even Tom. She held her stomach, felt a movement like a small, soft heel, and vomited over the rail.

  Grigory chuckled at her back and said, “Seasick already.”

  He had hovered all the while, never too close but never too far. His pipe failed to cloak his omnipresent stink—the reek of old beef caught between his teeth, a privy smell that issued like a vapor from his underclothes.

  Wind thumped the sails. They would soon clear the harbor. She walked away and stood beside a monstrous coil of rope, looking past the prow to where the ocean spread wide. The air was so pure it made her thoughts effervesce. The ship wouldn’t stop and she couldn’t swim back, and so she looked ahead to Bruntland, past the continent of waves, imagining a trim white cottage in the country. When her breaths tightened up, she clutched her chest and pricked her finger on a straight pin fastening her gown. It made her think of Frances sewing buttons in a rocking chair, sitting near the hearth with Molly at her side. They would soon be reunited, cozy in the winter: Molly crunching through the snow with a fresh pail of milk, admiring the hills and smiling at the flurries. Home. A proper home, free of scrutiny and secrets.

  Nicholas was right. She adapted. She survived. “You are you, purely you,” her brother had insisted. But her Mollyness was gone, abandoned in the Orange. How could she have trusted him to liberate Tom? The whole of Root erupted into life within her mind but Tom was all she cared about, the only one she focused on, and picturing him dead sucked the color from her life and made a sinkhole, pulling all her memories inside.

  Grigory approached. He grinned at her with something less than idle curiosity: a sensual appraisal and a newborn ease, now that he was free of her brother’s watchful eye. He had hacked people’s limbs and relished the employment. There were others just like him on the continent behind her: Nicholas’s roaches, thriving in his care. They would scurry back to Root and feed however they pleased.

  “I’m going to the head,” she said.

  “Happy to assist.”

  “Did my brother tell you what happened to the last man who troubled me at sea?”

  “Ain’t no trouble if you’re willing,” Grigory said, but then he stood aside and let her go without impediment.

  The main facilities were unenclosed holes along the bowsprit, visible to anybody standing on deck. Molly approached Captain Lark, a wide-mouthed giant with a heartbroken manner, and he granted her permission to relieve herself below. A friendly midshipman led her into the quarter gallery, hung a lantern from a ceiling hook, and left her there alone.

  The room was dankly cold and solid oak, floor to ceiling. Paneled windows canted outward at the stern, a bench with cushioned seating spanned the rear wall, and a scarred, heavy table with a brass candelabrum stood fastened into place on a mildewed rug. Molly felt ill, much worse than at the taffrail, but instead of using the head she sat on the bench below the windows, removed her cloak, and rolled her sleeves as high as they would go.

  She took the pin she’d pricked her finger on and touched it to her forearm. The point was rather dull; she would need to use pressure. The first quick puncture brought water to her eyes. A perfect bead of blood issued with the sting, smearing when she moved the pin’s tip just beside it. The second and the third pricks were closer to her veins. She thought of Lem’s scars, numerous as freckles. Then she thought of Bess, parentless and sobbing, and she pricked herself again.

  Each new stab raised awareness of the others. She continued down her arm from her elbow to her wrist, two for every inch—half a dozen, then a dozen, every pinhole a choice, every choice another vision. Frances with her handkerchief, crying in the hansom. Wickware shivering with terror in the garret. Mr. Fen underwater. Prick, prick, prick. The pin grew slippery from the blood she was drawing, and she pinched the metal harder till her fingertips paled. She remembered John Summer riding off to Burn. She couldn’t bear the memories of the cabin in the snow, so she turned her mind to Root. There the blood really flowed.

  Tom’s broken nose and battered ribs from having saved her. The boy she’d almost killed, glowing in the storm. Abigail’s kitchen splashed with candlefruit wax.

  Faster, Molly thought.

  She moved the pin up and down until the skin was fully speckled, then began her second arm.

  The broken fiddle and the cannon. Tom refusing to accompany his friends to Shepherd’s Inn. The pricks were deeper now and quicker, and the pain was like a burn, and Molly concentrated hard and watched the bloody pin. She thought of her hurtfulness to Bess. Benjamin’s hand.
Lem’s skull. The winterbear crunching on the dead mare’s bones.

  Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas. Leaving home. Leaving home.

  Blood dribbled to her hands and gathered in her palms. She cleaned them on her skirt, wiped her eyes, put away the pin, and concealed both arms underneath her cloak. The pain was like a noise she had almost ceased to hear, blaring everywhere inside her and enveloping her thoughts. She stood before the windows but she couldn’t see the water, only her reflection with the cabin light behind her. The ship was gaining speed. Had they already cleared the harbor?

  She took the lantern from its hook and hurried on deck, where she handed off the light and thanked the midshipman and the captain, both of whom—especially Captain Lark—eyed her closely. Molly passed Grigory at the stern with extra haste, worried that the blood was visible upon her.

  “Better now, love?” he asked.

  She continued to the rail and looked toward the city. Either side of them, the land still cupped around the harbor. They were not in the open sea but there was no time to lose. It was difficult to see by the mist-shrouded moonlight; Molly scanned the water for the whitecaps and lulls, the texture and the skein of all the water far below.

  “There!” she said, pointing slightly starboard into the dark.

  “What?” Grigory said.

  “My rescue is at hand.”

  He scoffed but took a step, squinting more at her than at the place where she was pointing. She had escaped from him before and he was wary of a trick; surely Nicholas had warned him that she wasn’t to be trusted. But her smile held strong and had the hoped-for effect. His doubt began to waver. Molly focused on the wake. She needed him beside her, right against the rail.

  “What are you on about?” he asked, standing at her shoulder, squinting at the harbor for whatever she had seen.

  Molly’s feet were anchors. She had strength but couldn’t move. A fall would not be fatal but it was still a long way down; she wondered how fast the ship could mount a rescue. Could she do it after all? She thought of Tom, of how their limbs had interwoven in the dark. She thought of pregnancy and swelled. She was light enough to float.