Bell Weather (15 page)

“You think it simple,” he said. “Rich and poor, sharing bread. Use my influence and wealth to blow away their sufferings. What would you yourself be willing to contribute? Shall I sell your favorite horse? He would fetch a goodly sum. A horse to buy them bread because they menace you with violence. Go to them and try.”

He swiped the letter from the table, strode toward the hearth, and crunched the paper into her hands again, holding it in place—and Molly, too—and standing so close she couldn’t focus on his face.

“You have always been selfish and shortsighted,” he said. “No better than the mob, demanding what you want, smashing everything and everyone you find along the way. The Rouge felt the need to swallow up Floria. My children felt the need to overturn the home. And yet if everyone has rights, unlimited and free…”

He could find no language for the fate that he envisioned.

Molly squeezed the letter, hardening her knuckles underneath his grip.

Bell released her, stepping back and looking foreign in his uniform—a person whom she knew as if she’d seen him in a dream, too at odds with his reality to truly be familiar.

*   *   *

Overnight the city roiled. Bands of men with soot-blacked faces broke the wheel of a local gristmill, ransacked a boat loaded with wheat, destroyed a turnpike, and pummeled a pair of watchmen. Most of the affluent families in the vicinity of Worthington Square had already fled to the countryside, taking what valuables they could and leaving their houses to the mercy of the mob.

Molly spent the night hopelessly awake, drawn to the window time and again by distant shouts in the fog-drowned city. She washed and dressed long before dawn, eschewing her stays and feeling unsupported in their absence, and then she waited on the stairs and saw her father going out, his medals, boots, and buckles appearing to shine innately in the shadows near the door. He wore a tricorne and gloves and had a pistol at his hip, and when he sensed her there, he stopped and looked up.

“Stay in your room and lock the door.”

“Shouldn’t we leave?” Molly asked.

“No one drives us from our home.”

“What if the mob attacks?”

“Your brother taught you to shoot,” he said. “You have my leave to do so.”

And then without so much as glimpsing his eyes a final time, she watched him leave the house, off to meet his troops. Molly waited to hear the sound of his horse, and once the hoofbeats had faded up the street, the quiet of the home and of the predawn city had an ominous weight, a rumble of things to come that seemed to vibrate the floor. She ran up the hall to her brother’s locked door.

“Nicholas!” she said, rattling the knob and pressing her ear against the oak. He neither opened the door nor spoke, and she was stabbed with the possibility that Nicholas had died, his condition having worsened unexpectedly during the night.

“Oh, Nicholas, please!” she cried. “Speak to me, at least!”

But after many such attempts there was nothing else to do, so she convinced herself that Nicholas was merely fast asleep, having languished for days in injury and hunger.

She returned to her room and lit a candle. The air was damp and windless, and although her second-floor window opened above the street, she could see very little of the city through the gloom. The pistol lay beside her, fully loaded, on a table. She touched the handle now and then, hoping its presence alone would ward off danger, just as dressing for the rain seemed to guarantee sun.

She continued hearing voices, ever closer to the house. When day began to break, the voices overlapped. The mob was massing in the east and marching up the streets. Clanks and bangs echoed in the unprotected square, and the sun burned the mist into thinner sheets and tendrils. She discerned the men and women coming nearer with their weapons. Passing glimpses—a cluster here, a party there—made the crowd seem infinitely large, moving like a mudslide darkening the ground.

She half-cocked the gun and held it under the sill. The front of the mob appeared in a line, filling up the street between a pair of stately houses. Smocks and gowns, leather and wool; faces hard as bone. Hundreds more surged in behind them from the cross streets. A window broke. The voices coalesced, rising in a chant—“Old prices! Old prices!”—as the mob moved forward into the empty, elegant green.

They halted at the garden in the middle of the square—men and women, young and old, carrying sticks and signs and hayforks and tools of their professions. There was a blacksmith with hammer and tongs, a butcher with his knives, a woman with a torch, a beggar with a rock. Children stood among them, laughing out and shouting, glad as if the riot were a holiday fair.

They parted up the center to allow a small procession: four somber men wearing charcoal coats, following a tall, thin matron in a shawl. She had a bundle wrapped in funeral crepe nestled to her chest. At the sight of her, the mob fell quiet with its chant.

An unseen fiddle played “My Darlin’ Dead an’ Gone.”

Molly leaned out and strained her eyes in dread. The church bell tolled. The matron bowed her head. The mourners stood aside like parentheses around her, and she stood for half a minute till the bell died away. A pale wreath of fog drifted through the green.

The matron raised the bundle: it was a small loaf of bread.

Molly’s deep relief was jolted by the roar. Every implement and picket sign waved in fury as the mob rallied up around the woman with the loaf.

They stormed beneath the window in a sea of fists and boards. Dirty, angry faces spotted her at the window and Molly leapt away. She banged her head against a bedpost, moaned, and dropped the gun. Windows shattered downstairs. They were beating on the house and hollering for Bell, and as she fell to her knees and fumbled for the gun, footsteps pounded upstairs and reached the hall.

She aimed the pistol at her door and half-squeezed the trigger, and she almost didn’t notice when the knob began to turn. The door opened smoothly on its oiled brass hinges.

Molly fired.

She saw her brother for an instant in the smoke.

“Nicholas!” she cried.

He fell against the doorframe and looked at her, amazed.

She ran to him and crouched, patting him down and searching for the blood upon his clothes. He smiled archly with his broken tooth and plum-colored bruises. Molly propped him up but he was stable on his feet. Maybe the ball had fallen out when Molly dropped the gun. That or she had missed. Either way, he was fine.

“Thank God!” she said and kissed him. “I went to your room, I tried to rouse you!”

“I was out before dawn, finishing arrangements. Bring the pistol,” Nicholas said. “We haven’t time to load it but the sight of it may help us.”

Molly crossed the room, retrieved the gun, and followed him down to the rear of the house, where a small wooden trunk waited in the kitchen. Nicholas took the pistol and said, “You’ll have to carry our luggage.”

He had not yet recovered from the beating and he hunched, temples fluttering, his swollen face glistening with sweat. Molly lugged the trunk by its thick leather handle. Nicholas checked out back, saw that it was safe—the mob was still in front, battering the door—and led her into the courtyard. They hurried through the garden, where the roses’ scent reminded her of summertime with Frances, and her heart bubbled up to think of seeing her again. Where else would they be going, but to Frances in the country? Then she wondered:
What of Father? What of Newton and the others?

Nicholas urged her on. They exited the courtyard and stood in the narrow alley, where an offshoot of rioters discovered them and glared. Nicholas raised the gun and shouted, “Old prices! Old prices!”

A bearded man with a rag around his head barged toward them. They were wearing finer clothes than any of the rabble and the man flared his nose, smelling something rich.

He grinned at Nicholas’s bruises and said, “Met the ugly stick!”

“So did you,” Nicholas answered, pointing—with the pistol—at the rag around his head.

“Aye!” the man said. “Knot the size o’ Parliament. Got it from the whoreson constable himself!”

He waved a poker as he spoke and almost hit Molly. Soon the rabble he was leading hemmed them in tight.

Nicholas gestured to his bruises. “From the hand of General Bell. I’m stealing his daughter here as recompense”—he squeezed her like a lover—“while the rest of you barbarians tussle over trinkets.”

The bearded man guffawed, showing five brown teeth. He looked at Molly with lascivious delight and pinched her cheek. “What will Daddy say to that?”

“He’ll read the riot act,” she said. “Especially when he hears I’m three months with child.”

Everyone around them howled out with laughter.

The man doffed his rag and showed his veiny knot. “May your children be a plague upon your bugger of a father!”

“Plague upon Bell!” Nicholas agreed.

The cry was taken up and spread around the crowd. Molly and Nicholas were jostled, pulled, and welcomed as companions, forced to go along until they reached the heart of the square. The boiling-onion odor of a thousand fevered bodies roused something deep in Molly’s soul—was it hope?—that she recognized but hadn’t fully felt in many months. The mob, however violent, was primarily exultant, surging shoulder to shoulder and gorgeously alive.

“Old prices!” Molly yelled, lugging the trunk.

“Burn it all!” Nicholas said. “Damn the King! Damn Bell!”

They moved with the crowd, across the street and over the walkway that ringed the circular green, trampling down flowerbeds and ornamental shrubs. The newly risen sun fell sideways upon them, but they always seemed to stand in someone else’s shadow and the morning felt dark, even in the light. They reached the center of the green and were surrounded by the pale, regal homes.

The mob began to slow and partially retreat, gathering together like a muscle contracting. Molly wondered what had stopped them. She was too short to see above the acreage of heads, so she stood on the trunk, holding Nicholas’s hand. She gasped and would have fallen, but the crowd propped her up.

“What do you see there, girl?” someone hollered at her back.

There was a hundred-foot gap before the mob’s front line: a span of empty grass, a white stone path, and then the broad street beyond packed tight with ordered soldiers. They were perfectly arranged in rows of twenty men, endless violet uniforms and shining bayonets. At the head of the major force, two wider rows of soldiers had detached themselves and faced the mob in firing formation: front line genuflecting, second line standing, muskets at the ready, fully primed and loaded.

General Bell, just behind them on his huge speckled gray, sat boldly in the saddle with his saber to the sky.

Word rippled through the crowd. A busy hush fell upon them.

“Disperse!” Bell called, clear above the murmur.

Molly saw the matron with her bundled loaf of bread. She walked alone into the gap, dignified and small. The vanguard of soldiers cocked and aimed their muskets, and the matron raised the loaf as if it truly were an infant. She approached General Bell without a trace of hesitation—spine erect, chin raised, her own long shadow stretching out before her. She was fifteen paces from the bayonets when the mob, drawing courage, shuffled up behind her.

Molly’s heartbeat stuck. She wrung her brother’s hand.

General Bell raised his gun and fired at the bread.

The shot pierced the loaf and hit the matron in the chest. She staggered to her knees, still offering the loaf. The troops fired next, a forty-gun volley, bright fire like lightning from a thick white cloud. Half the mob charged. The rest began to flee, running every which way until the threat of being trampled vastly outweighed the chance of being shot.

Molly tumbled off the trunk and landed on the grass. Children scrambled over her. A woman kicked her ear. A ragged group of sailors almost stomped her underfoot but Nicholas wrenched her up and said, “The trunk! Take the trunk!”

They zigzagged away, following paths through the crowd that seemed to magically appear, random as the gaps in windblown rain. There were screams and clashing blades, a thudding second volley from another line of soldiers. Molly crashed against a half-bald woman with a boning knife. The blade cut her arm just above the wrist. Molly felt the sting but didn’t stop to look, and it was all that she could do to drag the trunk amid the tumult, watching Nicholas’s coat and fearing she would lose him.

When they finally cleared the square, the mob began to thin. Molly paused for lack of breath before a grand, silent house, wishing she could enter it. The foggy dawn had sharpened to a crisp white morning and the cobblestoned street looked miraculously neat.

“Quickly,” Nicholas said, running back to pull her on.

His nearness jolted her and energized her legs, and they were off again, fleeing with the other panicked rioters. One of them, a brawny man, was bleeding from his neck. A yellow-haired woman sobbed against a hay cart. A very young soldier cowered in a doorway, clinging to his musket. The crackling gunfire faded with the distance from the green and yet persisted, clear and simple in the oddly vacant neighborhood. Footsteps echoed off the elegant fa
ç
ades.

They came at last to the harbor, where news of the massacre had just begun to spread. Many of the laborers, fishmongers, and rope makers had come from Worthington Square and stood about the docks, mortally subdued, but there were sailors hard at work: nothing stopped the tide.

The air was briny cool and spiced with smoke and herring. Molly’s lungs took the wind as fully as the sails. Sun struck brass and sparkled off the waves, a million glints of light that dazzled and dismayed her. Nicholas guided her down a flight of warped stairs, and it wasn’t until they reached the end of a pier before she finally snapped alert and said, “What are we doing? Why are we here?”

A man below her in a skiff, turning when she spoke, balanced calmly with a pipe and winked his wrinkly eye.

“My name is Jacob Smith,” Nicholas said. “You are my wife, Mary Smith. We are going to live with relatives in Floria.”