Bell Weather (35 page)

“I could climb and reach the star,” she said, gazing up and swaying as the clouds moved beyond it.

John knelt, afraid to stand, and pulled her in toward the bell.

“I will have my revenge,” he said. “What are you afraid of?”

“Restriction,” Molly said.

He held her wrists and wouldn’t release them. “You must say the secret word.”

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“I cannot say.”

“I cannot speak it, then.”

She watched him as he knelt. His hands were tight as manacles. He couldn’t bear the view and stared at her instead, looking up past her bosom to her face with concentration—playful brutishness, it seemed, or guarded desperation.

“Come now. Guess.”

“No,” Molly said.

“I won’t let you go.”

“Then we’ll stay until the moonrise.”

Wind snapped his sleeves and emphasized the height.

“I must devise another way to hold you,” John said, releasing her and creeping down the stairs as Molly laughed at him. She rubbed her wrists and briefly grew dizzy from the height.

*   *   *

“Are you showing him the city or the boundaries of the continent?” Nicholas asked irritably one evening, having spent the afternoon on her neglected translations.

“He is hopeless,” Molly said. “It’s miraculous he finds his way
here
every morning.”

“A wonder Kofi Baa thinks so highly of him.”

“You needn’t be jealous.”

“I am nothing of the sort,” Nicholas told her. “But I cannot spare you much longer from your work. Shall I remind you how desperate we had become before our current situation?”

“We couldn’t afford a spoon without Kofi’s help. I should think whatever he asks of us, however inconvenient—”

“Yes, of course,” Nicholas said with dubious conviction.

“He needs me one more day”—
Needs,
Molly thought—“and then he travels north to Kinship, eighty leagues away.”

“I know where Kinship is.”

On a map, out of reach. She saw the papers on her desk, a fortnight’s worth of unfinished work: contracts, lists of regulations, correspondence. Translating, copying, interpreting, repeating. Nicholas’s quill scratched itself dry. She felt the splitting of the nib, the speckling ink, the crinkling sheets—how flat and parched the future map of summer would become.

John had no additional business prior to his trip, and he and Molly spent the following day on a long, desultory amble through the city. The midmorning sun was painfully direct. Molly’s neck began to burn. John was heavy and subdued. They came to a tavern called Pike’s Salty Herring, crammed between houses and, with its dingy dark nooks and solitary drinkers, seeming cooler than the summer-bright street. Molly took a booth while John walked through to use the privy out back. She ordered a cider from the keep, a porcine man who rubbed his meaty knuckles.

“What’ll your husband want?” he asked.

Molly flushed and said, “The same.”

She sat in the booth, snugly shadowed, and watched as John returned and stopped to order at the bar.

“Your wife has beat you to it,” said the keep. “Be just a moment.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Summer,” John said when he rejoined her.

The dark was not enough to hide her from his stare, nor cool enough to moderate the swelter in her clothes. Her toes were wriggly moist deep inside her shoes and Molly smelled herself, slippery and sweet as buttered onions.

They talked for nearly an hour till the cider fizzed her head, and then they left and walked the sultry half mile to his inn. Molly clasped his arm and told him she was faint. It wasn’t a ruse. Colors shifted and her vision turned sparkly. John held her close but his voice seemed distant. The distortions didn’t pass until he took her inside, sat her in a chair, and fanned her with a newspaper. The owner of the inn brought her rum and water. He offered to summon a doctor.

“No,” Molly said. “It’s nothing. Too much sun.”

The drink revived her enough to stand. They thanked the owner for his care and John led her upstairs so she could rest, close her eyes, and thoroughly recover. It was a tiny room, softly green with ivy-patterned walls. There was a bed, a desk, and two packed trunks beneath a window.

John closed the door. She clapped her hands around his cheeks and kissed him on the mouth, clinging to his body like a warm wet leaf. He pushed her off but held her arms, rebuffing her but keeping her, his grimace so intense she might have called it murderous if not for how his eyelids flickered in alarm.

“He isn’t my husband. He’s my brother,” Molly said. “His name is Nicholas.”

It felt as if a sea breeze billowed through her ribs. She’d rarely talked of Nicholas, and John had rarely asked. He must have been suspicious but to say it out loud, in the light and with his cider-sweet flavor on her lips, felt as brash and oddly natural as taking off her clothes. His jaw hung agape. Then it closed. Then it flexed. He inhaled through his nose as if her voice were a fragrance and he wasn’t yet sure if it was poisonous or clean.

He pulled her in slowly, dropped her arms, and caught her waist. Molly held his head again, thumbs behind his ears, and kissed him so deeply that he hummed through her tongue. She leaned away and gasped, surprised and out of air. It wasn’t as she’d imagined it would be but rather slipperier, and messier, and firmer, and a great deal softer.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you since we met.”

“I know,” John said. “I thought of stealing you away.”

“You can’t.”

“I could.”

“I’m here,” she said—a yes, a no, a compromise.

He backed her through the room, toward the bed against the wall: a little four-poster, uncurtained for the summer, making it appear both cozy and exposed. She leaned against the footboard, trying not to fall, but the board rose only to the bottoms of her thighs and Molly tilted till she reached out and caught him round the hips. He said, “I’ve found what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid of Nicholas.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

He held her breasts through her stays. She liked the way they flattened and expanded in his palms.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Play along,” John said.

He took his waistcoat and shirt off. Molly touched his chest. She couldn’t feel his heart but she imagined it, enormous. He had mossy black hair around his wide, dark nipples and she wished it weren’t there; she couldn’t say why. He was skinnier and smoother than he’d seemed fully dressed, which made her think of sticks with the bark peeled away.

“I’ll take my clothes off,” she said, proud to get it right, embarrassed to be talking but incapable of stopping. She hopped to get her shoes off, blinded by her hair, and struggled with her stomacher, pricking her fingertip and saying, “Oh, these stupid pins.”

He turned her at the bed and unlaced her stays. They had such a clumsy time of diligently undressing her, she didn’t feel naked till she turned back around, wearing nothing but her stockings, and hugged him both to cover up and give herself away. She rubbed her face around his collarbone, mashing up her nose. She nudged him back and tugged his breeches down, and with it his erection, causing it to pop back up when it was free. Molly laughed. He sucked her breasts, first one and then the other.

“Hmm,” she said, gazing at the heat-blurred room.

A cloud of sunny motes swirled around her head. She arched back and tried to keep stable on the mattress but her hands kept sinking and her feet began to slip. The awkwardness distracted her. She worried he would notice but was irritated, too, because he wouldn’t help support her.

“Wait,” Molly said.

She righted herself and sat. Her bareness on the counterpane delighted her anew, reminding her of dressing in her room when she was little, when her nakedness was simple—something glorious and fun. She rolled her stockings off, dropped them on the floor, and raised her eyes. John’s erection stood before her, inches from her nose. She’d never examined one before—its veins, its lurid strangeness—and she leaned in close until her breath moved the hairs. His balls were light and solid when she held them in her hand.

“One’s bigger than the other,” Molly said, full of wonder.

She made a fist around his penis and began to move the skin. A tiny drop of fluid glistened at the tip. She thought of Mr. Fen’s clammy member in the hammock, but she didn’t let go when John kissed her mouth again, laid her on the bed, and knelt between her thighs.

He drove his forearms down on either side of Molly’s ribcage, knuckles at her armpits, hovering above. She raised her knees and let her legs fall wider when he settled. He was heavy, also taller, with his stubble on her brow. His spine was slightly crooked when she hugged him round the back. He lowered his face and kissed her as he poked around below, aiming with his hips until he pushed himself in.

It didn’t want to fit. Suddenly it did. She bit his lip and made him bleed, less from pain than from surprise. He tried to look impassive but the bite had clearly hurt. Her own pain was closer to a throb than a sting, feeling like a bruise that would tenderize later. The bed was too petite; she bumped the wall stretching back. When she moved her face forward so her chin was at his neck, their temples clunked together.

“Sorry!” Molly said.

He thrust and hit a spot, very deep, that made her pelvis ring. She saw her own foot flopping in the air and watched his backside contracting and expanding, hard at work. She tried to pay attention—was he enjoying this? was she?—but there was too much to follow, too many jolts and flashes. It was close but oddly distant. She surrendered, then revived.

John finished quickly, spasming inside her with a bodywide clench. She was pleasantly relieved the experience was over and her inundated thoughts could finally get some air. He was leaden but alert. When his lungs swelled and emptied, Molly listened with a sigh. She rubbed his hair and saw his breeches still bunched around his ankles and he looked much younger than before, like a boy.

Molly sneezed. It startled both of them and shook them into laughter, and he peeled himself off and lay beside her, hip to hip. She felt the spill between her legs and touched it with her fingers.

“Don’t be frightened of the blood,” he said. “It’s natural at first.”

“I know. My brother explained…” She heard herself and paused. “I didn’t have a mother or a governess to ask. Nicholas taught me things to warn me and prepare me.”

“And your marriage?”

“It’s a ruse. We’re hiding from our father.”

She listened to his heart, reassuringly alive, and curled against him with the sunlight falling on her knees. The sun was overhead, straight above the roof, and must have been reflecting off something outside. Another window, Molly thought. What if somebody had seen?

John didn’t speak. He expected her to talk. The ivy-patterned walls seemed denser as she stared, and his muscles felt tighter than an octopus knot. She could tell him just enough, embroidering the lie. Instead she told him everything, as true as she remembered, till at last his body softened and he stroked her sweaty hair.

*   *   *

He escorted her home an hour after dark but stopped to let her walk the last stretch alone. To face Nicholas together would exacerbate the risk. Molly pulled him into a shadow for a kiss before she lost him—his plans could not be changed, he left for Kinship tomorrow—and he promised he would think of some solution and return. Molly wasn’t sure. Having dallied with adultery, or something very like it in the weeks of his suspicions, he’d failed to act and finally let Molly take the lead. Had the reason been restraint, or had the jeopardy dissuaded him? And how did he view her now—as the artificial wife of a cunning young man whose fortunes, like his own, were bound to Kofi Baa? If their lies and misbehavior reached Kofi’s ears … Molly’s heart sank, imagining their patron’s disappointment. All his trust, all their prospects would shrivel in the flame.

“Write,” Molly said.

“I will,” John assured her.

She drew him from the shadows but his face remained opaque. The nearest burning streetlamp was several doors away and even now, after making love twice and studying him for hours, she couldn’t read his body language, couldn’t guess his thoughts.

A final kiss and then he left, preoccupied and grave.

Molly found Nicholas waiting in the glum brown office. He sat behind the desk, trimming quills with a penknife, its silver looking fiery and keen beside a candle. His eyes had the same lively flicker as the blade.

She closed the door and felt exposed, as she had been with John Summer, and discovered the exposure made her liberated, strong. Dressed or undressed, fettered or released, she was whole within herself again, completely Molly Bell.

“You’ll tell me you’re in love and need your freedom,” Nicholas said. “Can you tell what I will answer?”

His expression and his tone were pompously serene. There he sat, so certain he was privy to her secrets, and she hesitated, wondering how informed he truly was. His contacts and clients were dispersed throughout the city. Someone might have seen her, Mrs. Jacob Smith, entering the inn on the arm of John Summer and remaining there, cloistered in his room, until the dark.

“I don’t care what you answer,” Molly said.

“You do.”

Nicholas pressed the penknife’s blade against his lips, the way a man in contemplation might gesture with a finger. Molly held his gaze but swayed in her resolve. She used a table heaped with books as a low defensive wall, needing something more physical than insolence between them. Molly still viewed him as the brother of her memory, desperate in his privacy and quiet self-reliance. Yet he had aged beyond his years since arriving in the city. He was graying over the ears, hard to rile, hard to gauge, his authority as natural and tailored as a uniform.

“You’re becoming like Father,” Molly said.

His temple vein bulged. He lowered the knife as if his arm hadn’t strength enough to hold it. Then his eyes met the challenge and replied:

I am better.

Molly clutched her hair until it made her think of John, how his hands had combed the strands, catching in the knots.