Bell Weather (26 page)

The hearth log collapsed and the fire died down. The room’s red glow was like a second, deeper sunset, heralding a night more dangerous and dark. Pitt’s scarlet coat turned the shade of old blood. Instead of growing surly at the summary dismissal, the sheriff nodded his head, puffed his chest military-style, and strode toward the door with dignified exhaustion. Tom saw him out and resecured the door while Bess took the last empty dishes to the kitchen.

Molly and Nabby examined each other in wary, intimate silence, as if the oldest woman in Root were actually a witch, viewing the newest woman in Root as either a rival or a pupil.

“The child ghost distrusts you,” Nabby finally said, “but shouldn’t harm you in your sleep, so long as you behave.”

With that, she went to her own small room off the kitchen.

Benjamin spoke to Molly, too privately for Tom to overhear, presumably to offer an apology for Abigail. He hugged her once more, crossed the room, and said to Tom, “Keep an eye on her tonight.”

“I mean to,” he said. “I could use you here tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here at first light,” Benjamin assured him, straightening his glasses and appearing, as he did so, to straighten out his thoughts. “Tom,” he said discreetly. “The Maimer will be judged by a town predecided. Either silence or confession will secure his noose. When he hangs, all he knows and hasn’t spoken hangs with him. If we hope to learn enough to thwart more attacks, you must convince him to divulge whatever secrets he is keeping.”

“How?” Tom said.

“Abigail would counsel him to think upon his soul. He may consider it at night, when fear of hell is more enfleshed.”

Tom thought it futile but refrained from contradicting him. He shook his friend’s hand, walked him out, and locked the front door one last time. Bess took Molly to the privy out back, and once the women had said good night and gone to Bess’s room upstairs, Tom relieved himself in the garden and thought of the Maimer tied to the chair.

“Let him piss himself,” he thought, lacing up and going in.

After confirming that every door and window was secure, he stirred down the hearth and carried a candle and a pistol upstairs, where Ichabod was still keeping guard at the prisoner’s door.

“Go on to bed,” Tom said. “I need you vital in the morning.”

Ichabod retired and Tom remained a minute on his own, hearing nothing from the Maimer but occasional creaks and moans. He went to his own room down the hall and listened to the tavern, waiting for an unfamiliar shifting in the timbers, and it was now the hectic day hit him full bore. He wobbled at the knees, and yawned until his vision blurred, and longed to get in bed but didn’t dare—not tonight.

He occupied himself by reconsidering what had happened, word by word and detail by detail, and he had been musing for a while, half sleeping on his feet, when he sensed a subtle change in the character of the silence. Judging by the candle, half an hour had elapsed. He thought he heard a sound. What it was he couldn’t say.

He opened the door and checked the empty hall, then crept toward the prisoner’s room, pistol in hand and traversing the dark by memory, avoiding the one warped floorboard that squeaked against the joists. The crack at the base of the prisoner’s door flickered from within. He paused and heard the S’s of a rush of whispered words.

He didn’t bother with the key. The lock was disengaged—he could feel it—so he raised the gun and held his breath and opened the door abruptly.

A candle on the floor showed the Maimer in his chair. Molly held the knife that Pitt had left behind. She removed it from the Maimer’s throat and dropped it in surprise. It wasn’t the gun she seemed to fear, or even Tom’s reaction, but the loss of what had brought her there—the loss of some advantage.

She had been crying but contained herself and backed toward the corner. The Maimer wasn’t cut. He smiled in relief, but his eyes looked frightened and his cheek flesh twitched. The door had moved the candle flame; shadows grew and shifted. Molly’s face seemed to pulse, her tears lightly glistened, and her wide-open eyes had their own clear fire.

Tom stepped toward her, kicking the candle in distraction and grabbing her arm in the dark. Molly pulled away. He didn’t want a struggle with the Maimer right beside them so he backed toward the door and said, “Downstairs. Now.”

Once he had her out of the room, he locked the door a second time—lot of ruddy good the first time had done—and led her down the stairs as quietly as he could. Molly stepped on every loose board along the way, including the third-to-last step with its low, mournful groan.

He sat her at a table in the middle of the taproom. Nabby’s door opened in the shadows off the kitchen.

“Only me,” Tom said.

Nabby mumbled and retreated.

He stirred the embers in the hearth, lit a taper, and ignited a whale-oil lantern hanging from a rafter. The light was pure and gentle, like a touch of summer dawn. Molly watched the flame, distant but alert, her illuminated face seeming younger in the glow but older in expression. She was difficult to read.

He put a kettle in the hearth and ground smoak behind the bar. The nuts were tough to pulverize and Tom muscled in, using so much force he almost bent the grinder’s handle. It was a violent sound but yielded fluffy powder in the box, which he spooned into cups and stirred with boiling water. Molly didn’t move when he set a cup before her, and he stood a minute longer, looking down at her and breathing in the aromatic steam.

Then he sat and held her hand, both gentle and direct. She was hot beneath his palm.

“Drink,” he said.

He squeezed her hand. She sighed and took a sip.

It might have been Elkinaki firewater, to judge by her wince. That was everyone’s reaction to a first taste of smoak—its bitter-rich, cinnamony, burnt-black flavor—but he’d bet a silver plate she would crave it ever after. Molly put it down and looked considerably sharper. Her breath intermingled with the fragrance of the smoak and made a spice so potent that his skin began to tingle.

“You’re good at picking locks,” he said.

“I learned it growing up.”

“With other people’s locks?”

“No, at home,” Molly said.

Tom released her hand and drank his smoak, leaning back.

“Tell me about that.”

“Not now.”

“You want to reconsider,” Tom said. “Because I know it ain’t your memory that’s keeping you from talking. I already think the worst, and I don’t want to. I truly don’t.”

The lantern just behind him threw his shadow on her bosom, darkening the leaf-print pattern of her gown.

“You know him,” Tom said.

“I’ve seen him before.”

“He’s seen you, too.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Molly tremored when she spoke but looked defensively resolved, like a person loath to fight finally putting up her fists. “In Grayport,” she said.

“You lived there?”

She nodded.

“With your brother,” Tom said.

Molly gripped her cup. Her eyes shone brightly, not as if to cry but rather as if her feelings had been heated, like an oil. Tom leaned against the table. They were close, knee to knee.

“You’re trying to decide if you should trust me,” Tom said. “Here’s how it is. You haven’t got a choice. Keeping secrets anymore ain’t a God-given right.”

Molly clamped her lips and didn’t speak for half a minute. Then her shoulders drooped, her face collapsed, and out the story came.

Chapter Seventeen

Molly and Nicholas disembarked the
Cleaver
on a cold November afternoon, having traveled from the warm Bruntish summer to the first light snow of Florian autumn.

Grayport, the oldest city on the continent, stood against the harbor like a miniature Umber, with the Arrowhead River flowing along the west and the wooded frontier encircling its borders. The city drew its name from a rare form of salt—a mineral in the bay that evaporated with the water and effloresced, like fuzzy crystal mold, anywhere the rain or mist carried it from the harbor. Drifts and pillars of the salt could be seen around the docks, trees stood gray and yet surprisingly survived, and the buildings looked far more aged than they were. Grime and patchwork were everywhere and gave the houses and the port a workmanlike appeal, as of structures roughly used and practically repaired. It was a lived-in city, now to be their home.

Despite Molly’s affection for Captain Veer and the crew, she said her goodbyes quickly—though tearfully with kind Mr. Knacker—and the siblings hurried off, eager to leave the ship’s stinking confines, the sailors’ questions about their prospects, and the pall of Mr. Fen’s unexplained death.

Nicholas’s health had largely rebounded but his strength, such as it was, had not entirely returned. Molly dragged their trunk, all they owned in the world, and scraped a trail in the clean inch of snow upon the wharf. She marveled at the firm, still planks beneath her feet, the unfamiliar gravity of ground that didn’t tip. The weather made the city beyond the docks as blurry as the ships in the white-gray harbor. The air was clean and cold, the smell of people, cod, rotten wood, and even her own unwashed body given freshness by the sea. There were tables of vegetables and fish; barrels, crates, and carts; cats and dogs and fearless gulls; drunks and raggedy children. Hawkers sized them up, some with offers of goods or greetings of dubious intent, but by and large they were no more regarded than anyone else around the dockyard.

Nicholas strode ahead and almost lost her in the crowd. Twice she said, “Nicholas,” and twice he didn’t turn. Molly dragged on, frazzled and alert, and saw her brother more than thirty paces off and never slowing. Wind razored through her cloak. The snow chilled her toes. She stamped her feet to warm them up and dropped the trunk, becoming an obstacle in the walkway and refusing to move another step, ignoring the grumbling passersby and balling up her fists.

“Jacob Smith!” she yelled.

Her brother stopped and turned. He made his way back with quick deliberate steps, a thin dark figure in the crosswind of flurries, as cool as she was hot, and maddeningly blank. Each was all the other had, and he had very nearly left her, merely to reinforce the lesson of their names.

“No one’s listening!” she said. “No one cares who we are!”

“We talked about this,” Nicholas replied.

“We’re here without a friend or anyplace to go, and you’re prepared to walk away because I called you by your name!” Her shout drew the hesitant attention of a constable, a portly man with fat silver buttons on his greatcoat. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas!” Molly yelled to prove her point. No one listened. No one cared. In fact, her overcooked dramatics turned the constable away, as she appeared to be a wife giving fire to her husband, something far too common to arouse the law’s suspicions.

Nicholas slumped and bowed his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her shoes.

The frailty of his will—an inner slump to match the outer, which she couldn’t remember seeing in her brother all his life—frostbit her hopes. They were equals now, tiny and encumbered by their freedom, as reliant on her wits as on Nicholas’s.

He tried to hide a cough. Molly’s stomach swooped and growled. She had caught a whiff of bread that made her ravenously hungry, and rather than console her brother in his doubt, she picked up the trunk and followed the aroma, keeping Nicholas behind her as she wove through the crowd.

The smell disappeared. She had possibly imagined it, but now that she was leading she was warmer, more determined, and she came upon a cart of plump frozen apples. The vendor was a man with pink protruding eyes, very like the snow-packed fruits he was selling. He stared with terrible acuity at everyone who passed, assessing whether they were customers or thieves, giving the same sharp look to well-dressed matrons as he did to wily children and a lean mongrel dog.

Molly hadn’t tasted apples since they’d sailed from Umber—only hardtack and salted meat and vegetables the likes of which she wouldn’t have fed to hogs. Nicholas stood beside her, out of breath and shivering hard. The apple seller glared.

Molly smiled and said, “Good day.”

“Good day,” the seller answered. “Rosy apple for you, miss?”

“I haven’t any money,” Molly said.

The seller blinked, or rather puckered at the eyes without closing up the lids. Molly opened the trunk and found a beaver cap mashed among the clothes.

“What are you doing?” Nicholas asked.

“I’m going to sing for coins.”

Her brother cocked a brow and said, “Molly. You cannot.”

It was true. She couldn’t sing. Even Frances had discouraged her—Frances, who encouraged her to dance, which Molly excelled at, and to practice speaking Rouge, which Molly learned with much complaint, and to swim and ride her horse and play the harpsichord with Nicholas: anything to keep her out of trouble with her father. Anything but sing. She could read a sheet, name a pitch, and memorize a tune, but though her speaking voice was sweet and bright, her singing voice was not.

“Torturous,” her father had called it. “Discordant,” said her brother. “It is a gift God withheld,” Frances gingerly suggested.

Molly would sooner win a coin juggling cats or eating fire. She set the cap upside down in the snow, ushered Nicholas behind her, and stood on the trunk. Then she swelled her chest and sang:

’Twas on the deep Eccentric

Midst extraordinary gales

A sailor tumbled overboard

Among the sharks and whales!

He vanished in a blink

So headlong down went he

And went out of sight

Like a wrinkle of light

In the darkness of the sea!

“God’s blood!” a passing trader said, covering his ears. The fishmongers stared, openmouthed as mackerel. A rope beater paused in the beating of his rope.

We lowered a boat to find his corpse

And mourn whate’er we could

When up he bobbed and split the waves

Like a buoyant piece of wood!