Bell Weather (12 page)

Molly watched without a word—even with the firelight behind her, Mrs. Wickware’s tears were easily discerned—and took a small step forward, reaching out to hold the governess’s hand.

Mrs. Wickware flinched like a child from a wasp. She retreated into her own room, inhaled sharply through her nose, and tried to conceal her trembling limbs by hugging herself and narrowing her stance.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “I don’t know what you’ve lost.”

Mrs. Wickware staggered from the warmth in Molly’s voice, unsure if it was innocence or masterful dissembling. Either way it meant despair—her treasure had been taken—so Mrs. Wickware returned to her table in a slump, where she locked the rest of her possessions into the box and raised her glass of sherry.

She had poured the drink in the dark, but now that the fire had brightened the room, she was able to see the dead, tumid leech in her decanter. She shoved it away with a spasm of her arm, overturning the decanter and spilling the sherry upon the rug, but after staring at the leech where it lay inside the crystal, she turned to the glass she had already poured and drank anyway, moaning as she gulped.

*   *   *

Before the dawn of a late winter day, Mrs. Wickware awoke from a dream in which she and her husband rode together in a hansom. He was younger than she had known him in life, ruddy with success—he had just cured a government minister’s daughter of dropsy—and was wearing a splendid blue ribbon on the tail of his wig. He squeezed her knee and said, “I am always at your side.” He kissed her earlobe. She pushed him off and smiled out the window.

Now she opened her eyes in bed, and her attempts to reenter the dream were thwarted by a headache, a marrow-deep chill, and the curious markings, unfamiliar in the gloom, that she glimpsed on the wall beside her mirror. She pulled her covers off, wrapped herself in a robe, and lit a candle from the embers in the hearth. As soon as she raised the light, a single word leapt forth. It appeared to have been written by a finger dipped in ink.

ALONE

The room was nearly cold enough to see her own breath, but her skin began to moisten and the wallpaper rippled, like air above a strong source of heat. The shutters were locked. So were the doors. Mrs. Wickware checked them all, including those in the adjoining chamber, which had been empty ever since she had allowed Molly to return to her own private room. The girl’s nightly proximity had finally unnerved her, and yet as soon as Molly had gone, Mrs. Wickware had missed her, feeling gravely alone in the dark and often summoning servants, at ungodly hours, for the sole purpose of seeing another human being.

She examined the word on the wall. The ink was wet—glistening and fresh enough to smell—and she rang the bell and swigged from a bottle of rum before the chambermaid appeared and was sent to fetch the others, everyone in the house.

Once the staff had gathered and seen the word upon the wall, she was amazed that none of them could offer an explanation. It was the first offense in months that hadn’t been blamed immediately on Molly, whose hands—like those of the servants—were free of any stain. Nicholas alone had ink upon his fingers, but only from his quill and not enough to warrant Mrs. Wickware’s suspicion. Yet her nerves were disarrayed and she seized both of his hands, holding them up and fixing him with a look more of lunacy than anger.

Nicholas, a full head taller, straightened up and stared at her with dark, contemptuous eyes.

“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “If I were to threaten you with words, I would do it to your face.”

She sickened from his voice, unprepared for his defiance and releasing him at once. But Molly’s pitying expression troubled Mrs. Wickware more. The world was in reverse, with Nicholas, once so frail, now suddenly reptilian, and the girl, so defiant, now angelically serene.

“Where is Jeremy?” Nicholas asked.

As if responding to the question, footsteps were heard upon the stairs beyond the room and seconds later he appeared, parting the servants with his bulk and scowling about with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Where have you been?” Mrs. Wickware asked.

“Someone blacked me hands.”

“What do you mean, blacked your hands?” she said, her voice an octave higher.

“Soot,” Jeremy said, looking about and settling on Molly. “I woke and there was greasy black soot upon me hands.”

His hands were red and clean.

“You washed them in your basin,” Mrs. Wickware said.

“Aye.”

“Bring the basin.”

Jeremy slouched forward, broadening his back. “I dumped it in the chamberpot. You’re welcome to a look.”

“How dare you!” Mrs. Wickware said, emboldened by her fear. “What of this? What of this?” she cried, pointing at the wall.

He saw the word and grunted as if her purpose was to shame him.

“You know I can’t read,” he said.

A fact she had forgotten. Jeremy’s well-scrubbed fingers couldn’t be ignored, but she was not yet prepared to openly accuse him, not without proof.

After she dismissed the staff and calmed herself with rum, Mrs. Wickware stared at the mysterious word for many minutes, thinking obsessively of Jeremy and his demeanor over the past few weeks. She had known the man for years, ever since her husband engaged him—a destitute gravedigger—to carry their belongings to a newly rented flat. He had proved so reliable, so willing to do the most menial chores, that he had been permanently added to their staff. Upon her husband’s early death, Mrs. Wickware had brought Jeremy to her first governessing position, where his brutishness was useful in the care of wild children. He had always been trustworthy, if only for being stupid, pliable, and thankful of better employment after a decade of cold, muddy graveyards.

Molly’s misbehavior had altered him, however. Because of his failure to constrain or intimidate Molly during the months of her rebellion, Mrs. Wickware chastised him often, in her drunken irritability, both for things that he had done and things that he had not. Jeremy had grown surly. Over the last fortnight, he had greeted Mrs. Wickware with evident displeasure, and although he continued to follow instructions, she feared that he was losing all respect for her authority.

She kept a very close watch over Jeremy throughout the rest of the day. Indeed, she followed his movements and questioned the servants about his activities with so much single-minded fervor that Molly’s usual mischief went entirely unnoticed. Each of Jeremy’s actions—“He is cleaning his shoes, ma’am,” or “He was walking toward the library”—filled her with suspicion. How had he sullied his shoes? What business had an illiterate man in a room full of books?

It took a full pint of rum for Mrs. Wickware to sleep. When she woke the following morning and lit a candle, she discovered on the wall:

I CAN WACH YOU TO

Mrs. Wickware bolted from her room and rushed downstairs. She lost her footing near the landing, banged her hip against the newel post, and hurried on with tears streaming from her eyes. When she knocked on Newton’s door—the first that she encountered—he answered her summons directly from his sleep, wearing a sleeping gown and robe and entirely bald, much to her surprise, without his customary wig. But it was he who looked amazed to see her there, wild-eyed and pale in nothing but her shift.

She seized his arm and dragged him along, shouting at every door, “Wake up! Come out at once!” and by the time they had crossed the house and reached the door of Jeremy’s room, a mass of dazed and underdressed servants was assembled in the hall.

Molly and Nicholas moved to the front, standing on either side of Mrs. Wickware as she knocked, received no answer from within, and opened the door with a trembling hand. Jeremy lay in his bed like someone heavily drugged. The room was hot and smoky from a poorly vented fire, and now with the entire household trying to cram inside, the meaty stink of the chamberpot and of Jeremy’s own rarely washed body made the atmosphere intolerably dense. Newton raised a candle.

At the moment when Mrs. Wickware spotted the ink on Jeremy’s fingers, Nicholas stumbled into her shoulder, righted himself, and turned with curiosity to examine the floor. He knelt and found a plank that was loosened from the rest, and when he lifted it away and Newton lowered the light, they saw that Mrs. Wickware’s belongings—everything she’d lost—were piled there together in the gap between the joists.

She fell to her hands and knees and rummaged through the items, picking them up and throwing them aside until the floor was strewn with them, while the staff, backing up, shuffled their feet so as not to be struck by a hairbrush, a pincushion, a hand mirror. Dozens of items emerged, some of which she hadn’t even known had disappeared, and yet the one she wanted most was nowhere to be found: her husband’s glass eye, which she had treasured since his death, often staring at the iris and pretending he could see her. It was the only fantastical thing that Ms. Wickware believed and therefore the strongest. She was lost without the eye.

Jeremy had come sluggishly awake in the commotion, knuckling into his face before he finally looked around and leapt to his feet, startled by the crowd. His legs had yet to wake. He fell against the wall, dashing his head upon the wainscot and dazing himself anew.

“What have you done with it?” Mrs. Wickware said from the floor, her face so distorted it appeared about to melt. “Tell me where you’ve hidden it!”

Jeremy hunched and scowled. “I haven’t took a thing, you mad fucking wench.”

“Call the constable!” she yelled, rising to her feet. “Call the constable at once!”

Newton handed off the candle and hurried up the hall, and were it not for so many others standing in the room, Jeremy might have closed his inky hands around Mrs. Wickware’s throat. Nevertheless he clearly imagined doing it, staring dumbly at her neck and flexing his fingers as he struggled, in his strange lethargic rage, to shake confusion from his mind and grasp the situation.

Eventually he knew that staying put was not in his interest, and since none of the staff was willing to restrain him, he dressed and packed a trunk and hauled it to the door with Mrs. Wickware shadowing his heels, yelling, “Stop! I’ll see you jailed for this!”

He left the house and lumbered off, wobbly on his feet but fast enough to vanish into the predawn gloom. Mrs. Wickware stood at the front door for some time, scarcely covered in her shift and needled by a very fine, windblown snow. At last she went inside and dressed to meet the constable, who promised to inform her as soon as Jeremy was apprehended. She spent the greater part of the day cloistered in her room, leaving only to reexamine the floor of Jeremy’s chamber—the eye could not be found—until at nightfall she locked her shutters and door and fell asleep, with a bottle of rum hugged tightly to her bosom.

In the late morning of the following day, having overslept the sunrise and been insensible of the servants’ tentative knocks upon her door, she woke in the frigid room with a headache and sickening pangs of hunger. But though her symptoms were appalling and she grieved the loss of her husband’s eye, she lit the candle at her bedside and felt a glimmer of hope. Jeremy was gone, the worst was done, and there was something almost soothing in the thought of facing Molly, whose behavior, though appalling, rarely seemed malevolent.

But when the candle brightened the room, she saw the shutters were ajar, and there were large, muddy footprints leading from the window to her bed.

She found a wound upon her forearm, a mutilated leech lying on her table, and—written on the wall with her own sucked blood—a single word:

HELL

She covered her face and wept.

Chapter Nine

Molly aimed the gun and tightened her finger on the trigger. It was a flintlock pistol made of hardwood and nickel, and her arm began to shake until she worried the gun would fire accidentally as she paused. Mrs. Wickware’s former chamber was bright and sultry from the late-August sun, and although her skin itched maddeningly beneath her garters and her stays, Molly squinted her eyes and refused to be distracted.

“Wait!” Nicholas said.

She smiled puckishly at this and thought of firing at once, but the tension of the music, sparkling as he played, enchanted her and charmed away her frivolous temptation. Nicholas finished the larghetto—it was “The Cuckoo and the Mockingbird,” a favorite of theirs and one of his finer harpsichord transcriptions—and held his fingers over the keys.

“Wait a full measure. On the beat,” Nicholas said.

He opened the allegro with a high glittery flourish. On the first determined beat, Molly fired the gun.

Smoke blossomed with the bang. The sound was deafening; she sensed her brother playing just beside her, but the harpsichord’s notes were silenced by the after-ring. Her hand tingled sweetly from the powerful vibration, and the smell of burnt powder filled her with euphoria. The target—a human skull that Nicholas had purchased last spring—grinned back at her unharmed. The gun had not been loaded with a ball, only powder.

When the movement came to a close three minutes later, she could hear the delicate notes again and felt, as she so often did at the end of Brondel’s works, a comfort that could turn upon a breath to woeful longing. The cure was more Brondel, more shots, more indulgence. But they all led to yearning and a color of despair.

Mrs. Wickware had retreated to the garret to drink, sleep, and fret. The menacing words and torments had continued after the departure of Jeremy, who had presumably fled Umber under threat of arrest but was believed by Mrs. Wickware to be watching the house and planning revenge. The stolen items had of course been planted under the floorboard by Nicholas, who had slipped a sedative into Jeremy’s nightly drink and smeared the telltale ink upon the sleeping brute’s fingers.

At Molly’s urging, the glass eye had been “discovered” in Jeremy’s pillow and returned to a tearful Mrs. Wickware, who kept it on her person at all times and was known to spend hours gazing at its deep blue iris. But whether the woman had truly gone mad or simply fallen into profound, constant drunkenness was undetermined and, frankly speaking, immaterial. Either way, she had abdicated all authority and felt safest in the garret, high above the street and away from the rest of the house. Servants delivered her meals and bottles of rum at regular hours. They tidied her things and replenished her laundry and gave her no reason to venture around the house, providing instead continual reports, both real and invented, of local break-ins, murders, and supernatural phenomena, which encouraged Mrs. Wickware to lock the door and cower, day after day, with the talismanic comfort of her husband’s glass eye.