Bell Weather (32 page)

Tom returned the tobacco rope to its hook. He carried the candle from the middle of the room and set the pewter holder on the table. Then he gently stuffed his pipe, inverted the bulb over the flame, and drew until it crackled. Molly squinted at the candle after sitting in the dark, enjoying how the light seemed to hold them in its aura.

“Mr. Pitt’s wife confided in my mother, who sympathized and wanted to help. My parents had talked about moving to Root. There were opportunities here—less competition than the city, cheap land. My father had made some money as a brewer in the city. He offered to buy the tavern—temporarily, to keep it from the creditors—and get it into shape while the Pitts stayed in Grayport to settle their affairs. Mr. Pitt agreed. He took the proceeds and paid down a number of his debts. The plan was when the shipment made Mr. Pitt’s fortune, my father would sell the tavern back and be paid an extra sum for his assistance, more than enough to settle our family permanently in Root … But you have to understand,” Tom said gravely, “no one, including Mr. Pitt himself, honestly expected that shipment to succeed.”

Molly’s heart thumped warmer from the rum she had drunk. She breathed the pipe smoke, a fragrance she had come to adore, and listened with the dread and fascination of a child.

“My father called this place home as soon as we arrived,” Tom said. “He rebuilt the storeroom, hired Nabby as a cook, and brewed better beer than Root had ever tasted. He was one of the first to roast smoaknuts. He learned it from the Elkinaki. People liked him. By the end of the winter, the tavern was a popular place, and when the road cleared in spring, he started making money.”

Tom smoked to calm down, gazing at the ember, but he coughed as if he’d never smoked a pipe and couldn’t take it. Another pulse of lightning came without sound and the rain dripped softly from the eaves above the window.

“The shipment got through,” Tom said slowly. “Mr. Pitt was in the black. But people in Root liked the tavern just the way it was. So did my father. When the Pitts returned from Grayport prepared to buy it back, my father wouldn’t sell. Mr. Pitt was furious. He built this place, he said. ‘And wrecked it,’ said my father. ‘It was me who built it up again and saved you from the creditors.’ Mr. Pitt returned to Grayport and fought it with a lawyer, but the law stood against him. There was nothing he could do. So he rode back to Root, brought a pistol, and shot my father dead in front of thirty-seven witnesses.”

He said the word “dead” with a visible deflation. Molly dug her fingernails fiercely into her knees.

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Ten,” Tom said, cradling his pipe so his hand seemed to smoke. “I was back behind the bar, tapping a keg of ale. My brother was in the stables. Our father made us work like any other hands. We groused a lot but loved the way he treated us like men. I was struggling with the tap and looked to him for help. He was five paces off, standing near my mother with his back toward the door. I suppose he looked like me—the way I look now. My mother was pretty but frail. She had a crooked leg from birth. It made her stand with her right side lower than her left, but she learned to tilt her head a certain way in compensation. It made her look thoughtful, like the tilt was curiosity.”

Tom stared back in the direction of the bar as if his mother, even now, were curiously watching.

“Mr. Pitt walked in. I saw him in the crowd but couldn’t place him right away. He didn’t have his wig and I had never seen him bald. He’d ridden nonstop from Grayport, changing horses on the way, and he was so exhausted that his eyes looked punched. ‘Orange,’ he said, and raised the gun. My father turned his chest directly into the shot. I thought my ears had burst. I’d never heard a pistol fired indoors. My father fell back, like the sound had knocked him over, with a pained look of outrage twisting up his face. I don’t recall seeing any blood. Only smoke.”

Molly squeezed her trigger finger inward with her thumb. Her knuckle cracked. The smell of burnt sulfur stung her nose.

“A group of men tackled Mr. Pitt,” Tom said. “Someone dragged me out—I don’t remember who—and I couldn’t see my mother. When I didn’t hear her crying, I thought my father might be all right. The place was in an uproar, my ears were numb, and I kept expecting my mother to call for me or Win, tell us not to worry. It was only when they got me outside I heard her screaming.”

Tom’s voice sounded peaceful, almost casual to Molly, as if the story wasn’t his but something he’d been told. Seventeen years had passed since it happened—seventeen years of living with the shot. He hadn’t moved beyond it, Molly thought. He’d grown around it, like the flesh around the sharpshooter’s bullet in his shoulder.

“Mr. Pitt was tried and hanged,” Tom said. “My mother stayed home—she wouldn’t get out of bed—but me and Win sneaked out. I sat in the crook of a tree, a long way off from the crowd, and started crying when I saw him. They had him on a horse with the rope around a branch, and someone smacked the horse to make it bolt. At first I thought the smack was his neck getting cracked. It made me stop crying but the plainness of it scared me, how he dangled from the rope and twitched until he died. Then I noticed James Pitt standing with his mother. He was ten like me and looking at his father. I watched him so long, he finally stared back. He’d been crying, too, but then he wasn’t anymore. We’ve been looking at each other that way ever since.”

Tom scraped his chair a leg’s length back and sized Molly up, as if her body, not her face, would show the depth of her reaction. Silence was her answer, and a heartsore chill, for both ten-year-old Tom and ten-year-old Pitt, as well as for the losses in her own private memories.

“Our family ran the tavern after that,” Tom said. “We hired hands to do the work we couldn’t fully manage, but me and Win grew up fast and my mother was determined. She was never very strong but she was tough, and even the locals who had sided with the Pitts didn’t hold the outcome against her. When the war broke out, my brother went to sea and I joined the army. We wanted to see the world. My mother encouraged it. But when she died here alone, I blamed myself for leaving.”

“I left my father,” Molly said, as if a tourniquet had slipped and opened up the flow. “I thought he might have died the day I ran away.”

Tom sat straight and gripped her with his eyes. His stare was so direct, Molly’s face began to ache. She concentrated desperately to steady her expression.

“Did he?” Tom asked.

“No. He’s still alive.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Imagine Lem,” Molly said, “with influence and wealth.”

“That’s hard to do.”

“Then think of a nobleman who cracks a child’s tooth.” She thought of hugging him the day he said goodbye and left for Floria, of reaching for his saber when he dragged her on the floor. Love made her miss him, love and all its afterbirth. “I left to see the world and start new. Same as you.”

“I didn’t find what I expected,” Tom said.

“Neither did I.”

The tourniquet inside her reasserted force, causing her to hunch and put a hand upon her breastbone. Tom was too depleted to pursue it any further. He regarded her with something more than bottled curiosity—compassion, or a sense that she resembled General Bell?

“What happened to Pitt and his mother?” Molly asked.

“Back to Grayport first,” Tom said. “His mother eventually moved south to live with family. She died two years ago. When Pitt came of age, he tried to buy the tavern from my mother. She was kind to him. She pitied him but wouldn’t agree to sell. He stayed here in Root, bought a house, and went to war. He was sheriff after that, proud of having clout. But he wants this place. He’s never let it go. He says he has the money. Says he has a right.”

“Was your father right to keep it?”

“No,” Tom said. “He broke his word and all of us suffered. I hated him for that. But as far as I’m concerned, James Pitt lost his rights when his father shot mine.”

Molly couldn’t decide where the truer claim lay. Had she any better right to claim the tavern as her own? She stood and hugged Tom. He didn’t hug back. Then she knelt and laid her head very softly in his lap, as she used to do with Frances when her governess was sewing, and she looked out sideways, admiring the Orange and imagining, believing, she were really safe at home.

Chapter Twenty-One

Root ripened in September. Threadbare clouds made the sky seem bluer, and the forest’s ravishing colors spread forever to the east. The temper trees shed their clothes impulsively, in tantrums, dropping every last leaf in ten or twenty minutes. Molly could see one now, all a blur in fiery red, and wished she were standing underneath it in the rush.

It was Muster Day and most of Root had gathered near the Orange, filling the grounds between the road and the tavern with vegetable carts, livestock, handicrafts, and other wares. There were watermelons big as hogs and pumpkins big as wagon wheels. Tinkers, farriers, and cobblers plied their trades; children played at hoops; citizens raced and boxed; and although Molly was working with Bess to keep the tavern drinks flowing, she had reveled in the sights and smells, the bustle and variety.

Now she stood above the road and watched Root’s militia, who assembled twice a year to practice basic drills. Tom had spent the day as captain of the troops. He had never looked more handsome than he did in his greenspun uniform, his boots cleanly oiled and his hat freshly curled. Neither had he looked more livid and explosive. Things had gone badly from the opening roll call, when a quarter of the volunteers failed to arrive on time. Many were unprepared. Others forgot their guns. Marches were disorganized, volleys were delayed and out of sync, and there was too much conversation, laughter, and mutinous grumbling. As soon as Tom corrected one shortcoming, another would emerge, and although some of the onlookers and volunteers had begun to question his ability to captain, the troops’ ineptitude struck Molly as unnaturally consistent, almost as if the problems had an organizing hand.

She was thinking of it now, suspecting Sheriff Pitt, when she recognized a man she’d met with Nicholas in Grayport.

The man was fifty paces off, short and round with widely splayed feet and a pronounced flatness to his head. It gave him the appearance of a cross-sawn trunk, and his name was Mr. Bole, which heightened the effect. He had been one of her brother’s clients—Molly had translated pages of his dreary correspondence—and had hung about the office making friendly conversation. Now he noticed her, too, and smiled in recognition. She ducked and hastened off and hoped he wouldn’t follow.

Cravens spiraled by, making Molly flinch. These were tiny black birds that traveled by the hundred, terrified of everything and huddled into swarms. They flew toward a tree but the tree scared them off, and so they whirled, dark and fluid, in a smooth gorgeous panic.

Mr. Bole was on the move, waddling toward her. Molly zigzagged quickly through the Muster Day crowd. She walked behind a row of smoking metal drums, where a dozen men and women raked coals, added fuel, and roasted mounds of gathered smoaknuts to package for the winter. She continued around the side of the tavern, hidden by the smoak-roasters’ haze and coming to a cannon that was butted against the storeroom wall. The barrel pointed out across the river to the woods. She crouched behind its wheel and hoped she hadn’t been followed.

From her vantage point overlooking the bank, she could see a mile of the sun-gilt water in either direction. In the distance to the south, on the town’s side of the Antler, black-leaved smoak trees darkened like a burn. She had visited the smoakwood to help gather nuts. There the trees stood towering and twisted and majestic, and the shade held an ancient smell of cinnamon and soot. The quiet had a past there. Birds seemed to listen.
Good death,
she had thought, pressing on the soil, sensing in the gloom a hint of resurrection.

But even here in town with all the colors in profusion, there was something overripe and dreadful in the glory. Deadfall was coming. People talked about it constantly: a brutal freeze that would put an end to summer overnight. Benjamin insisted it could happen any day now, earlier than usual, according to the signs. The moon’s double halo. Caterpillar hues. The suicide weeds were already strangling themselves, and many people in the town had claimed to see the Colorless Man—one of the truest indications, Nabby and Benjamin agreed, that the season of adversity would soon be upon them.

Molly heard footsteps coming up behind her. It was Ichabod, flailing like a windmill and warding her away with broad, emphatic gestures. He shoved himself between her and the cannon, putting his hand upon her shoulder as he tried to catch his breath. Molly stepped back to give him room for explanation; she had learned to read his signs as well as anyone in Root.

“This is dangerous,” he signed. “Primed and loaded, ready to fire, and look—the barrel is loose.”

Molly saw where the trunnions had nearly broken free of the carriage.

“But why were you afraid?” she asked, studying the cannon. It was old, without a flintlock hammer to ignite it. “I couldn’t have set it off unless I had a light.”

She had, in recent days alone, disturbed a waterwasp hive, accidentally burned a patron’s ear, fallen from the hayloft, and ruptured a keg of beer.

Ichabod led her away from the gun.

“I’m not a
fuse,
” she said.

They stood together where the crowd was visible again. The militia’s drills had ended and the volunteers trooped with added vim toward the tavern, seeking drink and conversation and reprieve, earned or not, from Captain Tom Orange’s cantankerous command. Molly spotted Bess, pink and pretty in her calico dress beneath the sycamore, filling up tankards from a kilderkin of cider. Mr. Bole was there, too, asking Bess questions.

“I have to go,” Molly told Ichabod.

She cut across the lawn and yanked her friend’s arm.

“
There
you are,” Bess said, refusing to be budged. “You should’ve joined the ranks if you wanted to stare at the captain all day.”

Before Molly could lead her away, Mr. Bole asserted himself and said, “Mrs. Smith!”