Bell Weather (30 page)

Increasingly of late, Bess was peppering conversations with hints of irritation—or injury—so that Molly didn’t trust her with her own many secrets. No one believed in her amnesia anymore, but her capture of a Maimer had improved her reputation, and although it was widely assumed that her past was in some way disreputable, she was generally seen as a victim of circumstance rather than a menace.

Lucas finished his song and paused to wipe his face. Benjamin approached him with a thick roll of papers.

Molly filled a tankard from the cider tap, handed it to Bess, and pulled her startled friend before objections could be made. They squished through the crowd to Benjamin and Lucas. Bess tried to escape but Molly wouldn’t let her.

Benjamin attempted—not for the first time—to convince Lucas to play a piece from his own dear collection of music. The fiddler listened as politely as Benjamin persuaded, but he finally insisted that he lacked sufficient skill.

“I could tutor you,” Benjamin said. “I am certain you could learn to scrape a passable sonata. Perhaps not one of Hark’s, but there are many by Gorelli. You could practice the
Folia
.”

“You think too well of me, Dr. Knox,” Lucas said and smiled, noticing Bess despite her effort to retreat behind Molly.

Benjamin raised his sheets to try again when Molly said, “We won’t have music at all if he collapses from the heat.”

She twirled behind Bess and pushed her forward with the cider.

“Thankee, Bess,” Lucas said, and took it with a wink.

Bess hiccupped through a laugh and nearly died: he knew her name.

“May I speak with you, Doctor?” Molly said. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s a matter of terrible urgency.”

Benjamin turned professional at once, allowing himself to be dragged to the kitchen, where Nabby faced the hearth fire, sharpening a knife. Her withered face flickered like a warning of perdition. Molly explained why she had led Benjamin away, and he looked from the kitchen to the taproom, where Lucas held his fiddle up so Bess could pluck the strings.

“Infatuation,” Benjamin said. “One of the few common pains for which the cure, if one existed, would be ardently rejected.”

Nabby whisked her blade across a whetstone and said, “There’s wickedness in love.”

“Bite your tongue,” Molly said.

Nabby went to a table strewn with vegetables and organs. “Ask the child,” she continued, speaking of the tavern ghost. “She knew a touch of love and took it to her doom.”

“Is she here?” Molly asked.

Nabby pointed with her blade toward the middle of the hearth, where the drippings from a chicken crackled in the flames.

“Will she tell me her name tonight?” Molly asked.

“She’ll tell you when she trusts you.”

Molly scrutinized the hearthstones, uncertain of where to look; Benjamin, more intrigued by living beings who would speak to empty air, adjusted his glasses and focused on the women.

He said to Molly, “You perceive her with your senses?”

“Like a fragrance,” Molly said, and yet it wasn’t quite a scent but rather a fleeting saturation. It reminded her of things she had honestly forgotten in the hours of delirium that followed giving birth: her hand upon a heartbeat, a tugging at her breast. She couldn’t ascertain if the memories were real. Had she kissed her own baby on the head before she lost her?

Molly believed the ghost would know, and she longed for other answers, but Nabby said the child still considered her a stranger. If only there were a way to win the spirit’s trust. But now was not the time—she needed to hold herself together—so she went to the kitchen door again and looked across the taproom. The noisy hurly-burly of the drinkers perked her up.

“Can you describe the ghostly fragrance?” Benjamin asked her from behind.

“Lem,” Molly said.

“Lemuel Carver, did you say? Like the odor of corruption, or a stench of perspiration?”

“No, he’s here,” Molly answered, pulling Benjamin toward her. “He’s staggering drunk. There, he’s coming in the door.”

Benjamin craned his neck to see beyond the crowd. Lem shoved in, heavy-limbed, to find his daughter. Some of the drinkers swore and grumbled when he bumped them out of his way but nobody confronted him—a leatherbound giant with a three-week beard and a slaughterhouse mien.

“Go get Tom from the stables. I’ll get Bess,” Molly said. Benjamin hurried out the back, leaning forward like a turkey. Molly wove a path to Lucas and Bess and said, “Your father’s here, come on.”

There wasn’t any time. Lem cleaved the crowd, swept Molly out of the way, and closed a brawny hand around the meat of Bess’s arm. He smelled like pickled tongue and had a ghastly, peeling sunburn.

“You’re coming home now or I will tan your fucking hide,” he slurred.

Bess shrank back with teary, frantic eyes.

“Let her go!” Molly said.

The nearest patrons were either too surprised or too familiar with Lem to intervene. Lucas stepped forward, more from startlement than nerve, and laid his long fingers on the bulk of Lem’s shoulder.

“Mr. Carver,” he began.

Lem grabbed his throat. Bess shrieked and twisted free. The crowd erupted into shouts and two of the nearest men, able-bodied masons, futilely attempted to relax Lem’s grip.

Lucas reddened in the face and dropped his fiddle. Molly picked it up, held it by the neck, and swung it at the back of Lem’s enormous head. It fractured with a twang, musical and strange. Lem let go of the fiddler’s throat and backhanded Molly. She staggered, smelling blood. He raised his arm to hit her again but Tom arrived, threw a punch, and caught him in the liver, up beneath the ribs, with a hard-packed thump. Lem doubled over.

Tom seized him by the collar and the back of his breeches, the masons held his arms, and then they all dragged him out through the kitchen into the yard. Molly held a napkin to her nose and followed Bess, who looked as if she and not her father had been bludgeoned by the fiddle.

“Get him in the stocks,” Tom said behind the tavern.

The stocks were near the garden, just beyond the door light, tall enough to make a prisoner stand but low enough to force him into a stoop. The masons got Lem positioned in the notches. Tom clapped the stocks shut and locked the boards in place. Lem’s agony and drunkenness were wearing off together and he growled, shook the padlock, and drooled into his beard.

Bess held her fist very tightly to her lips. Molly stood beside her, trying to stop her nosebleed. Half the tavern followed them out and Lem’s fury hit a crescendo. He would either break the stocks or snap his neck with so much thrashing.

Tom dropped a bucket into the well and drew it up. He was hulking when he carried it—mightier than Lem in Molly’s estimation—and formidably calm as he walked toward the stocks. Tom splashed him in the face. “Sober up and settle down,” he said.

Incredibly, it worked; Lem began to moan, sagging as his beard dribbled water in the mud. Molly’s nose had bloodied the napkin and her whole head pulsed. Mosquitoes buzzed her ears but formed a cloud around Lem, whose tannery stink and helplessness attracted them in force.

“It’s over,” Tom said, backing everybody in.

Nabby was beside herself at having so much traffic in her kitchen. She tried to shoo them out when they turned to come inside again, but instead they heeded Tom, suffered Nabby’s hexes as they tromped back through, and returned to the stifling taproom, where nobody was left to serve drinks or keep the peace.

“You all right?” Tom said to Molly.

“It’s only a nosebleed.”

He turned and asked Bess, “What about you?”

She bubbled into sobs, as full of fury as of sadness. Tom hugged her close and let her blubber on his chest.

“Take her in,” he told Molly, speaking to her gently through a fissure in his anger. “And have Benjamin look at your nose. Will you do that for me?”

Molly nodded, pried Bess away from Tom, and led her into the kitchen, where they both rinsed their faces.

“Not a week goes by you don’t bloody up my kitchen,” Nabby said, but she was quick to hand Bess a restorative cup of wine.

Tom remained outside and Lem resumed shouting. Molly guided Bess out of earshot and into the taproom, where Benjamin stood examining Lucas, who held a glass of rum with badly trembling hands. His collar was torn. Angry red marks had risen on his neck. He pursed his lips and puffed, as if to breathe were still a challenge, and his fiddle lay demolished in a pool of spilled cider.

Bess’s eyes were round and raw.

“Nothing cracked or crushed,” Benjamin told the women, studying his patient with a palliative smile.

“I’m sorry about your fiddle,” Molly said with all her heart.

Lucas stooped and gathered it up, a mess of strings and fractured maple with the scroll still intact atop the separated neck. He looked at Molly sharply, as if she had broken it for sport, and glared at Bess as if she’d grown a beard and stank of rotten hides. When he stood and carried his poor, crumpled fiddle to the door, Bess collapsed into his empty chair and cried without reserve.

Cracked and crushed,
Molly thought, recalling Benjamin’s words, and cursed the spineless fiddler for abandoning her friend.

Sheriff Pitt strode in—scarlet-vested, flush with pomp—just as Lucas slouched out.

“What the deuce happened now?”

*   *   *

Tom breathed a gnat and bottled up a cough. The heavy dark air was full of barn musk and plant steam, and between the background chatter of the tavern and Lem’s protestations, a pressurized quiet filled Tom’s mind, thoughtless and profound, until he felt he’d either explode or stay that way forever. Then Pitt showed up.

“I see you treat your kin contemptuously, too,” the sheriff said.

Pitt crossed the yard halfway to Lem, who gentled down quickly in the presence of the law.

“He walked in fighting,” Tom said.

“He’s peaceable now.”

“That’s because he’s in the goddamned stocks.”

Pitt grinned. It broadened his cheeks and made his head look thicker. “I’m surprised you managed to hold him,” he said, “instead of shooting him in the back and letting him float to kingdom come.”

He plucked the key from Tom’s hand and unlocked the stocks.

Lem stepped away, slipping in his crapulence and landing in the mud. He wiped mosquitoes off his face, smearing himself with filth, and looked a perfect drunken wreck when he tottered to his feet. For a second his contrition seemed entirely sincere, and in his sweetness and distress he briefly resembled his sister. Tom felt the pang, remembering his mother, but he wouldn’t bow to gold-leaf memories tonight.

“Tell me what happened,” Pitt said.

“I was being a concerned
father,
is all,” Lem said, beady-eyed, sounding as if he’d memorized the words. “I come to the tavern and that fiddler boy is groping up my Bessie. ’Fore I know it, he attacks me.”

“Was that the way of it, Tom?”

“Not ruddy likely. I didn’t see the start of it,” he had to admit. “Benjamin called me in and Lem was hitting Molly.”

Pitt turned to fetch the doctor but he had already appeared, having patiently observed the situation from the kitchen. He lent an air of reason with his scholar-prim demeanor. Pitt looked relieved to see him at the door.

“I was summoning Tom from the stables,” Benjamin said, “and missed the first spark. I will attest that Lem arrived in high intoxication. Young Lucas had been seized about the neck and might have suffered worse—asphyxia, for instance, or compression of the larynx—if not for Molly and Tom’s intervention. Fourscore witnesses will verify the facts.”

“I only come to see my daughter,” Lem muttered with deflation. If Tom had closed his eyes to visualize the speaker, he might have imagined a well-mannered giant, ignorant but dignified, standing hat in hand with guileless intent. “I don’t see her no more, now that Tom has stole her off.”

“She ain’t a branded heifer,” Tom said. “She’s here of her own accord.”

He stood with Lem and Pitt, close enough to punch. Another squall was bearing down, invisible in the dark but sounding like wind with the rainfall rushing through the trees across the river. Pitt inhaled dramatically, averting his nose so as not to smell Lemuel directly.

“Go inside,” he said to Benjamin, who left without a word, and then it was just the three of them and Tom was on his own. “Bess is old enough to choose,” Pitt said to Lem. “And let’s not pretend you haven’t caused trouble before.”

Every now and then, the son of a bitch showed common sense.

But then he said to Tom, “That doesn’t make her being here seemly. This isn’t the first complaint I’ve had about your boarders.”

“Is that right.”

“Two young women living under your roof,” Pitt continued. “Folks would like to know the genuine thrust of the arrangement.”

“Folks,” Tom said. “Is this a formal complaint or just talk?”

“Call it a friendly warning.” The lanterns in the kitchen lit the side of Pitt’s head, showing half his face and leaving the other half eclipsed. “Get your house in order before it becomes a question of considering your license. I’m meeting with the governor next month and it’s my duty to mention any municipal concerns that need addressing.”

“Since when is hiring women a municipal concern?” Tom asked, backing Pitt up toward a shadowy pile of manure.

“I’ll make a list of incidents and nail it to your door,” Pitt said, presumably in jest. “You know I’ll have to speak about the prisoner who escaped.”

There had been three more attacks in the intervening weeks, and comments had been made, rarely to Tom’s face, that his failure to keep the Maimer secure had cost the town a vital advantage. Throughout the exchange, Lem had done his best to keep himself steady, but he suddenly lost his balance and stumbled into Pitt, who managed to prop him up but trampled the manure.

“You’re made for each other,” Tom said without amusement.

Pitt scowled at Lem and said, “Go home and sober up.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll reimburse me for the mess you caused tonight,” Tom said to his uncle.

“Not until you reimburse me for my Bessie,” Lem said.

“I’ll let her know you’re willing to barter. You can leave from out here. I don’t want you tracking filth through the tavern. You, too,” he said to Pitt, who only now looked down and saw what he was standing in.