Bell Weather (14 page)

The cook and her daughter, tipsy on one of the cellar’s finest vintages, were preparing a molded meringue in a lovely sea of custard when Bell walked into the kitchen. The daughter shrieked, the cook spilled wine across the custard, and Bell continued on his way, seeking Mrs. Wickware and getting one shock after another. The laundry maid, wearing a ball gown and surrounded by feral cats she had taken to feeding, was caught reading a scandalous novel in the library. The groom, who had learned to scrape a fiddle over the past year, sat in the stables playing an allemande to entertain the horses. So it went, room after room and servant after servant, until the majority of the house had been searched and the frantic staff hastened to bury evidence, tidying whatever they could before their master doubled back to question them at length.

Only Newton, who happened to be found in the act of polishing silver, escaped Bell’s fury. That he was polishing the silver for his own refined pleasure was moot. He seemed to be the well-dressed epitome of duty. Bell eagerly enlisted him to search for Mrs. Wickware.

“She stays in the garret, m’lord,” Newton said, betraying not the least surprise at seeing his master home.

The garret was locked. No one answered when they pounded on the door. Newton fetched a key and the two of them stepped inside. The garret had once been tidy but had fallen into neglect. Bats dangled from the rafters, furniture and crates had been arranged as a childish wall of protection around the bed, and all four corners were packed with empty bottles. The only bottle still containing rum was clutched to Mrs. Wickware’s bosom, like a long-treasured doll that someone had threatened to snatch. She sat on the bed in her nightclothes. Her hair had not been cut or even combed in many weeks. She had grown both flabbier and flimsier from drinking, and she stared at them—her eyeballs filmy and enormous—barely comprehending their appearance in the gloom.

General Bell ordered Newton to summon the constable and a dozen reliable men, and then he locked himself and Mrs. Wickware into the garret and didn’t emerge for more than an hour, not even when the officers had gathered in the foyer.

When they finally walked downstairs, Mrs. Wickware—according to those who glimpsed her as she left—appeared to have wept during her private time with Bell and bore a look of such utter desolation that the constable, a man of hard repute, draped her shoulders with a cloak and led her out with tender care.

The servants had done miraculous work in the hour while General Bell was cloistered in the garret. But however much they had managed to set right, there was no expunging the sights he had seen on his initial tour of the rooms, and everyone, with the exception of Newton, was taken by the constable’s men to be questioned and held in jail until a detailed account of the year’s derelictions was established.

Molly and Nicholas waited alone for more than two hours. From the window overlooking the street, they watched Mrs. Wickware and the rest of the staff being led away like common criminals, some of them in tears—including the groom, torn forever from his horses—and it was then that Molly’s trust in her brother’s design fell to pieces, and her guilt over the treatment of Mrs. Wickware multiplied with each of the fallen servants.

Nicholas himself seemed aghast at what was happening. He had meant to prepare the staff for this inevitable day, but he had banked on several more months to finalize arrangements. If all had gone to plan, their father would have returned to orchestrated chaos, a carefully wrought confusion with the servants at their best: loyal to a fault, overwhelmed but hard at work, struggling from the lack of Mrs. Wickware’s direction.

“There is nothing we can do,” he said now, leaving the window and straightening his collar in the mirror. “Our one remaining course is self-preservation.”

“Or admitting this was our doing,” Molly said.

He loosened his cravat to tie it more precisely, focusing on the knot as if perfecting it would neutralize the bedlam all around them.

“Do you believe,” he asked, “that Father will reinstate the staff if he discovers they were acting on the license of his children? That Mrs. Wickware will suffer any less in her defeat? We must appear the victims of a drunk, thieving tyrant. We will meet him not in fear but in the joy of his return.”

“What of the gun?” Molly asked.

Nicholas finished at the mirror. “Our initiative was strictly for protection of the home.”

Molly chewed her fingernail and smelled the burnt powder on her knuckles. Pheasants watched her from the wall:
You might have shot us, wicked girl
. And what were the servants saying now? They would curse her and accuse her, her and Nicholas together. Every cruel look she had suffered in her life swarmed around her, thick as bees, and crowded out her thoughts.

Nicholas held her by the shoulders. His grip was so gentle that at first she didn’t feel it.

“You are a woman of pluck and spirit,” he said. “Not the girl he left. We will weather this together.”

“Together,” Molly said.

“I suggest you pin your hair and tidy your appearance.”

Molly did as she was told, feeling plucky and, yes, more spirited than before. She brushed her hair, clenching her jaw until the knots and tangles came free, but just as she was about to pin it up, she heard their father’s steps approaching on the stairs and went to Nicholas’s side, still in disarray.

General Bell entered the room and strode directly forward, as if he meant to knock them down. Nicholas and Molly held their ground, forcing him to stop. He was close enough that Molly smelled the ocean on his clothes. They stood as they had been on the morning of his departure—their father in his uniform and tightly curled wig, the siblings arm to arm and facing him together—with the same dusty heat and overlong silence that had seemed, last summer, to have suffocated hope.

“You played a game at my expense and stained my reputation,” Bell began. “Word of this will spread: the man who led an army but could not command his children.”

“We are no longer children,” Nicholas said.

“You are worse than little children!”

“Mrs. Wickware…,” Molly said, faltering at once.

Bell’s expression of disdain was very close to hate.

“Are you saying you were victims?” he replied. “Children after all, once your governess abandoned you?”

“We did our best,” Molly said.

“Your best is wrack and ruin. And regardless, you are lying. I have talked to Mrs. Wickware and deduced the true state of affairs. What a thorough revolution! What pride you must have felt.”

“She misused us,” Nicholas said. “We were strong enough to beat her.”

“Strength.” Bell sneered.

“Hector all you like. We won’t be daunted anymore.”

As soon as Nicholas said it, Bell was at his neck, gripping the cravat he’d so elegantly tied. Molly had seen her father strong-arm Nicholas before but this was something different, like a pistol truly loaded. Bell tightened the cravat until her brother couldn’t breathe.

She shoved herself between them and was clouted on the ear. Nicholas freed himself and fell, clutching at his throat, and just as rapidly their father grabbed hold of Molly’s hair. He forced her down, dragged her sideways, and dumped her in the corner. Then he stormed again to Nicholas, who covered up his head, and Bell began to kick him in the stomach and the ribs.

Molly reached toward the handle of the saber on his belt.

Bell detected her and spun away, sensing her intent. He put his hand upon the guard to keep the blade sheathed and then he stared at her, astounded by her outstretched arm. Molly knelt before him, equally amazed. For a moment she had really meant to hurt him. Even now.

She crawled to Nicholas. The sight of him extinguished all her fire. He was motionless and fetal with his arms around his face, and the pale blue rug was spattered with his blood. She heard him faintly moaning and was hesitant to touch him. Proof of their rebellion lay scattered all around—unwashed clothes, dirty cups and plates—as if exploded from the spot where the three of them had struggled.

General Bell stood tall with the sun upon his coat, and his long, lean shadow stretched behind him on the floor.

“You have brought it on yourselves. I hoped that you would change. I hoped to find you grown. Your bravado was enough to shake a drunken widow but your strength is only show. I am still your lord and father. There is God and there is me,” he said, “and God cannot protect you.”

Chapter Ten

In three frenetic days, General Bell hired replacement servants; restored the house to its original splendor; brought formal charges against Mrs. Wickware, the former staff, and the chimney sweep; confined a broken Nicholas to his chamber; and abandoned Molly to her own devices, rightly confident that he had cowed her, at least for the time being, into submission. The siblings were not to communicate without his express permission, for the present time denied, and he also raised the specter of separating them on a permanent basis: if Molly so much as attempted to slip a note under her brother’s locked door, Nicholas would be enlisted in the navy, which given his chronic weakness was all but a sentence of death. The threat was not a bluff, nor was the prospect of sending Molly to St. Agatha’s Refining School for Young Women, an institution so infamously harsh that it was unfavorably compared to convents and workhouses.

Molly woke especially early on the fourth day, determined to speak with her father at length before he set about the business of the morning. She followed Newton upstairs when he delivered a pot of tea; the footman neither talked to Molly nor acknowledged her presence when he entered Bell’s room and left her in the darkness of the hall. Several minutes later, Newton emerged from the dimly lit chamber, halted at the door, and said to General Bell, as if he had nearly forgotten, “Nicholas’s appetite has revived. He asked for eggs and coffee.”

“Very good,” her father said from deep within the room.

It was the first piece of news Molly had heard about her brother since the beating, and she almost thanked Newton with a hug before he left. Instead she waited for him to go and stood at the open door. Her father was already uniformed but hadn’t donned his wig. His wool-gray hair hung loose around his neck. He stood before a carved mahogany table, which was strewn with letters and documents, and drank his boiling tea with grim preoccupation.

“You may not see him,” he said before she asked.

Molly raised her chin and stepped more boldly to the center of the room.

“Is he recovering?” she asked.

“You already know,” Bell said, “thanks to Newton’s carefully timed report.”

“Newton didn’t—”

“Of course he did. You needn’t worry,” Bell assured her, putting down his tea and organizing papers. “The man has proved himself invaluable. Allowances are made in the case of exemplary service.”

“But not for your children,” Molly said.

“Is that a joke? You had the liberty of royals and infinite allowances, and look at what you did.”

“You can’t keep us apart!”

“Go,” Bell said. “I haven’t time for this today.”

“No time for your own son and daughter?”

He snatched a letter off the table and thrust it into her hands. “Read,” he said. “Newton found it nailed to the front door.”

It was a ratty piece of foolscap, greasy and torn but inked with words that showed, in spirit if not in spelling, a strong determined hand.

To General Bell—

We poor of Umber heerby give you notise of our solem oath to stand and fight together, and vow to hang to death before we see our children starve from want of bread and common sustinance, while you and yours grow fat, and do not force the markits to comply with laws of fair and honest prices, for we are Bruntlanders and good as you and the King, and as deserving of our bread and natural born rights, and if you do not use the power given to you to make them execute those laws against this vilonas abuse and put a stop amediately to the shipment of necesary grains out of Umber, we will murder you and burn down your house and leave your children fatherless and poor so they may know what we and ours suffer each day in rechid destitushun.

Take Care.

Molly stepped back against the black brick hearth. She could see, as though the author’s hand were hovering before her, every dip of the quill and scratch upon the paper. The word “murder” seemed to glisten in its freshness, very like the words Nicholas had scrawled on Mrs. Wickware’s wall. Her father took the paper back and slapped it on the table. He opened a porcelain box and took a pinch of snuff.

“That is why I haven’t any time to nurse my children. Every wretch in Umber thinks himself a statesman. This is the third such letter fastened to our door. Their cries against the King are villainy and treason. They mean to march tomorrow, here upon the square, and I will meet them with a regiment of soldiers.”

The thought of the army in Worthington Square was so outrageous Molly laughed, but then her fear leapt up and choked the laughter in her throat.

“Is there no other way?” she asked.

“Can I resurrect the crops or un-fight the Rouge? The war has gutted the treasury, the harvest was abominable, and whatever grain is left must be sold to those who can afford it.”

“The price of bread is lawfully fixed,” Molly said, having learned about the markets, to her boredom, from her brother.

“Laws are bent in desperate times,” Bell said. “Are we to beggar the market vendors for turning a profit and providing for their own dependent families? Or shall we allow the blackguards who wrote this letter, who storm the mills and threaten our lives, to take whatever they please?”

“All they ask is fair prices,” Molly said, sounding sulkier than she wished.

“Fair?” Bell replied. “They threaten my life and children, call for fire and revolt and speak the word ‘fair’? It wasn’t I who made them hungry.”

“But you will make them starve.”

Bell smiled. It was a mirthless smile—the kind that people used to physically restrain themselves, a smile shown for insults to honor and intelligence.