Bell Weather (13 page)

The servants catered to the siblings’ every whim, not only because they were generously paid and enjoyed unprecedented liberty, but also because of the awe with which they viewed Nicholas, whose cunning had toppled Wickware. Meals were lavish and expensive, shared by everyone alike. Newton performed his basic duties but spent vast stretches of the day educating himself—he wished to become a lawyer—and modeling the latest fashions in the full-length mirror in his chamber. The maids did the minimum of necessary work, sending laundry out and leaving rooms, and even themselves, in luxurious disarray until the house, strewn with empty glasses and half-dressed servants, resembled the home of a libertine rather than that of a lord.

For all the apparent profligacy, Nicholas kept impeccable records of the household’s finances. No expense or line of credit went unpaid, and by selling valuable items—mostly Lord Bell’s—and lending money at interest to prodigal young gentlemen of Umber, he had actually increased the available funds while the rest of the city, including the gentry, felt the worsening pinch of an economy strained by a year of failing crops and the spectacular expense of the protracted overseas conflict.

Bruntland had finally won the war in Floria, thanks in large degree to their father’s pivotal victories over the Rouge at Godshorn and Fort Pine. The swiftly promoted General Bell had written a letter—delivered by packet ship the previous week—informing Molly and Nicholas that much remained to be done before his return to Umber, and that given the peril of ocean travel in autumn, they were unlikely to see him home before the New Year. “What will you tell him when he learns that most of his best possessions have been sold?” Molly had asked Nicholas one day, as he was locking up the proceeds from several pounds of silverware.

“I have sold only a fraction of his things,” Nicholas told her. “Most of them are pawned in Mrs. Wickware’s name. The servants will corroborate our story that she acted out of drunkenness. The rest of the missing items will be hung upon Jeremy, who is already wanted for theft. We have the constable’s report to verify the facts. When Father finds us as we are, he will admit his own folly in trusting us to Mrs. Wickware’s care and will, I suspect, summon Frances home directly. I would summon her myself, but it must be Father’s choice.”

Molly didn’t miss the discipline and bleedings, but she couldn’t make peace, as Nicholas had done, with Mrs. Wickware’s terror and debasement. She had visited the garret a number of times, hoping to alleviate the governess’s loneliness, but Molly’s appearance at the door had the opposite effect, convincing Mrs. Wickware that even the garret wasn’t sacrosanct and might, at any time, be threatened.

“We have treated her abominably,” Molly said as she cleared the barrel of the gun.

Nicholas sat before the harpsichord, its open lid exquisitely painted with a twilit sky. He had a thin dark beard and looked reasonably strong, having restored himself to something like his normal state of illness. He improvised a fugue, playing gently as he spoke.

“We claimed our natural right.”

“Home,” Molly sighed.

“Advantage,” Nicholas said. “All my life, I have thought myself strong but feared myself weak. Illness, doubt, our father’s and Mrs. Wickware’s tyrannical rule—I have suffered and survived them, and have vowed not to suffer disadvantage again. Strength isn’t granted. It is seized by the horns.”

Molly faced him with the gun, inadvertently aiming at his thigh, wrist, and neck as the barrel bobbed around and signaled her annoyance.

“You sound like Father.”

“Father lacks conviction,” Nicholas said. “He acts but then he hesitates, preoccupied with rightness. He beat the Rouge in Floria because, for once in his life, he shuffled right and wrong aside and trusted in his strength. Please lower the gun. Waving it about is gravely impolite.”

Molly kept it raised a moment longer in response.

Nicholas rounded out the fugue, its closing notes as chilly as a knife touching crystal. When the harpsichord was silent and the heat felt thick, Molly laid the pistol in front of Mrs. Wickware’s former mirror, where the gun and its reflection leveled up as if to duel.

She studied herself in the glass. More than ever, her resemblance to her mother was remarkable, and yet the contrasts were every bit as striking. They had the same small nose and asymmetrical eyes, the same black hair and clear white skin. But her mother in the old portrait looked demure, with a very faint smile, almost sad in its serenity. Molly, on the other hand, was tousled in and out. She looked forever like a girl who’d been rolling in a bed, or a woman blown to laughter by a great rush of wind.

Her growing breasts were less pronounced because her hips and derri
è
re had filled out, too. Yet they still looked surprising, buoyed by her stays, and felt delightful to her palms when she caressed them in the night. She thought it strange the way her baby fat had subtly returned, how she softened while her brother grew sinewy and sharp. She had her monthly blood now; the first time had alarmed her, but the chambermaid Elise had quickly eased her mind.

It was Elise that Molly had spied on throughout the summer when the maid, grown bold in Mrs. Wickware’s absence, spent most of her nights with a chimney sweep who climbed through her window after dark. They lit a small tin lantern on the table near the bed and Molly watched them from the hall, peering through the keyhole, curious at first when she passed and heard the sounds, then compulsive, having stayed and grown obsessed with what she saw.

The chimney sweep was filthy and could not be called attractive. He was gangly, to begin, with a tall narrow face, and showed a great many ribs through his winter-white skin. Yet his muscles and his tendons were intriguingly distinct, and Molly gasped to see his manhood rising and engorging.

She was shocked to see Elise take the length of it inside her—how delirious she seemed, how at ease with his ferocity! The way his skinny buttocks clenched together when he thrust, how his balls slapped against her like a loose sack of coins. It was altogether vulgar. It was violent and wet. Her body opened and enveloped him, absorbing all his force the way a pillow takes a punch, and what astonished Molly most was how Elise appeared to strengthen, and the chimney sweep to weaken till at last it seemed to kill him. Molly envied her immensely. What a gorgeous ruddy sweatiness and languor in her limbs! How adoringly the chimney sweep embraced her in relief.

“I’m bored,” Molly said.

“You’re free,” Nicholas answered. “You may do whatever you choose.”

He was right, in spite of the fact that he was constantly directing her. He’d taught her what her father hadn’t thought to teach a girl—politics, anatomy, and weaponry included—but as much as she appreciated all that she had learned, she chafed against his tutelage and yearned to get away.

Molly crossed the room and opened a sash. The street was lively far below, sunstruck and colorful with active passersby. There was a lady with a parasol and wide floral skirts. A tinker clinking spoons. A fiddler and a gypsy. Children sprinted by and Molly craned to see them, tipping dangerously forward on the sill.

“I want to go out,” she said. “I haven’t ridden in months, haven’t swum, haven’t—”

“We cannot travel as long as Mrs. Wickware is here,” Nicholas said. “She must be kept—”

“As I am kept, bottled here in Umber.”

“You could walk to view the sea.”

“And look at ships I cannot board.”

“Soon,” Nicholas said. “The world will open its doors and you will choose whichever you please. Come. Reload the gun.”

She twirled and clutched her hair. Another day, another week of stultifying lessons: kidneys, torts, firearms, sonatas and partitas. She walked toward the gun and said, “I want to use a ball.”

“It is needless,” Nicholas said, although the notion seemed to please him.

“Then I won’t practice shooting anymore.”

“You must.”

“Why?”

“Because—”

“I know,” she said, “I know,” having asked the question strictly out of petulance.

The truth was that Mrs. Wickware’s fear of home invasion was not entirely unfounded. There had, of late, been an upsurge of mutinous incidents throughout the city. Thefts, assaults, and murders; violent threats, both idle and enacted; speeches, strikes, and frequent calls to riot and revolt. The hungry lower class, unable to afford the barest of necessities, was demanding fixed prices in the marketplace, menacing vendors, railing against the government, and turning with alarming rapidity to crimes against the wealthy. With the cold season bearing down, there was no telling how severe the situation would become, and Nicholas insisted Molly learn to use a gun.

She thought of the people she had seen below her on the street and tried to imagine shooting someone dead—the tinker, perhaps, or one of the children’s downtrodden parents.

“Will you practice once more if I allow you to fire a ball?” Nicholas asked.

“Yes.”

“To Mercer
ó
n?”

“To Hark,” she said, measuring the powder.

She poured it into the upturned barrel. Nicholas watched and played an F-major prelude—the faster one she liked, the one that worked her up.

“The balls are kept—”

“I know where they are,” Molly said, hair falling around her cheeks as she opened the cherrywood box on the table under the mirror, picking out the truest, roundest ball that she could find.

She half-cocked the gun.

“Wadding fore and aft,” he said.

She tore scraps from one of Mrs. Wickware’s monogrammed handkerchiefs, added the wad, ball, and second wad, and tamped them down firmly with the ramrod.

“Note the depth of the rod,” Nicholas said, completing the prelude and starting up the fugue. “You can tell whether a gun is loaded without placing your eye before the muzzle.”

She felt the difference in the rod and then replaced it under the barrel. She primed the pan, closed the frizzen, fully cocked the gun, and waited for Nicholas to finish the fugue and start the prelude again.

“I suggest the northern wall,” he said—the only one of the four that led to an empty room.

Molly raised the gun and held it at arm’s length, warier than before, as if the pistol were a bomb, and trembled from the quickening excitement of her heart. The fugue’s complexity advanced and rose to frantic heights. She tried to pick a target on the pheasant-patterned wall—the blue with the beady eye, or the gray with the angular wing?—until the music neared its end and the pheasants looked afraid.

She fired the gun with the closing note, jolting with the shot. When the billow cleared away, she saw the hole beside the birds, many inches distant from the spot where she had aimed. Her ears were cottony again, her blood exuberantly thrilled. She went to the wall and stuck her finger in the hole before turning around to Nicholas, who looked toward the door, oddly disconcerted.

Molly felt a tremor and thought, “There’s someone on the stairs.”

The door banged open, bouncing off the wall. Molly dropped the gun. Nicholas rose and stumbled on the harpsichord stool.

All was silent, all was ringing in the presence of their father, who was standing in his uniform, glorious and violet, saber drawn and cold blue fire in his eyes.

“What the hell!” said General Bell.

He stalked into the room, saber raised as if he still expected ambush. He was shorter than Molly remembered, weathered from the war and from the journey overseas. His skin was darker and his wrinkles had become more severe, and yet in spite of looking older he exuded youthful vigor. Molly backed against the wall, leaving the pistol on the floor and honestly believing that he might attempt to slash her.

Nicholas stood beside his overturned stool, and there was fear—Molly felt it—in his silence and rigidity.

General Bell stopped and put his boot upon the pistol. He was speechless, too flustered by the shot, the lingering smoke, the catastrophe of the room, and his thunderstruck children to do more than look, and huff, and stand until the blade began to quiver in his hand.

“You’re home!” Molly said, stumbling forward as she spoke.

The movement startled General Bell. He tensed and widened his eyes.

“The shot…”

“It was me!” Molly said, involuntarily shouting. “Nicholas was teaching me in case … How can you be home?!”

She sidestepped his blade and forcefully embraced him, almost crying in her fright, almost laughing in her panic. Bell staggered back and pushed her off one-handed. He fixed her with a look so intense she couldn’t speak, and then he spun around to Nicholas and said, “Outrageous!
Outrageous!
”

Without waiting for his son to hazard a reply, he strode to the door as if intending to board the first ship back to Floria, but then he stopped, clapped his heels together military-style, and asked without turning around, “Where is Mrs. Wickware?”

“Drunk,” Nicholas said.

Bell’s perfect wig crept backward on his scalp.

“Stay in this room,” he said. “Do nothing until I return. If either of you leaves, if either of you moves—”

Molly trembled when he left without finishing his threat.

*   *   *

The mystery of General Bell’s early reappearance was no great mystery at all. Shortly after composing his last letter to Molly and Nicholas, in which he had written of returning no sooner than the New Year, he had received a summons to Umber from the Secretary of the Homeland, who had grown concerned about the popular unrest within the city and felt that Bell, who had so efficiently crushed the Rouge, was just the man they needed in the event of a serious uprising. Bell had sailed immediately and arrived this morning, having beaten the onset of autumn storms and enjoyed fair winds for the duration of his six-week voyage. He had hired a post chaise and ridden home directly from the harbor, and he had just entered the house and seen the disarray when the pistol shot rang out above him and he sprinted upstairs, fearing bloody murder and finding a scene nearly as atrocious.

Only a year of wartime command could have prepared him to master his emotions as he stalked through the house, hardening like diamond, and the full extent of the chaos rapidly revealed itself. After marching downstairs and slipping on a platter of half-eaten cake, he opened the first door he came upon and found Elise sprawled naked on her stomach. The chimney sweep, also naked, sprang from the bed, took one incisive look at the general in the doorway, and leapt out the window without a stitch of clothing. Elise jumped up and stood behind her bed, scarlet from her cheeks to her well-shaped thighs, having failed to grasp a sheet and concealing herself, as well as she could, with small fumbling hands. She fainted to the floor, spectacularly nude.