Bell Weather (45 page)

Nicholas hadn’t stood and Molly hadn’t heard a flint, but he had managed in the pause to reignite the candle—yet another of his mysteries and likely meant to vex her. Perhaps he’d hidden a living ember in a tin. She refused to look amazed, at least about the flame.

Nicholas fixed his hair and straightened out his coat. Red welts marked his face and he was swelling at the ear, and yet he didn’t touch the places she had struck or seem surprised. He looked at her with love and held the knife where she could see it.

“My happiness at finding you alive is unrequited.” Nicholas smiled weakly, like a child feigning courage. Molly stared to let him know that she could batter him again, even if it meant jumping toward the blade.

“You have questions,” he began.

“How are you alive? What have you done to Tom?”

“I’ll tell you. Please be patient.”

“No!” she said and tensed as if to stand again, defiant.

Nicholas flicked the knife above his knee to catch her eye. He cut his own leg, mirroring her wound. He didn’t wince. He didn’t explain. The gesture’s chilling strangeness made her watch very hard.

“I could tell you nothing at all,” he said, “and still your reappearance in the city would destroy me. But once you know the facts, you won’t tell a soul and you will choose, of your own free will, to leave forever.”

He handkerchiefed his cut with calm, delicate fingers and the candle flame stilled, growing steady in its light.

“I knew that you would come as soon as you read the letter,” he said.

“You said to ride for Liberty.”

“I banked on your rebellion. I prepared either way—unpredictability was ever in your nature—but your flight toward Grayport was vastly more likely.”

“You said my reappearance—”

“Listen, Molly. Listen. I have answers by the bushel. I watched you leave Root. You were a little less than graceful, jumping from the window, but you left in good time. I’m sorry about your horse. At least you saw a winterbear in all its fearsome glory.”

She pressed the wound above her knee. Blood slithered through her fingers, mingling with the blood from the mare’s severed neck, and then the memory and the smell made her cut sting worse.

“I paid William Shepherd to keep you here until I finished my work in Root,” Nicholas said.

Feeble old Shepherd. Oh, she’d been a fool!

“He is an honorable man,” Nicholas assured her. “I told the truth, as it happens: that my sister was running from trouble, and that for her sake, as well as for my own, it was imperative to keep her safe until I arrived. He was eager to assist. If not for my persuasion, he would not have taken payment.”

Words and words—what was he saying? Truth, William Shepherd, payment and persuasion. What did it matter? He was here and he was talking like her brother, like her too familiar, undead, infuriating brother, and the one thing she needed him to clarify was how.

“I killed you,” Molly said.

He raised the blade like a finger to his lips and said, “Shush. I will tell you how we came from Grayport to this. Whatever your emotions, I encourage you to rein them. Tom Orange has a much sharper blade to his throat.”

“Tell me what you’ve done.”

Nicholas laughed and wiped his face, amused by her contrariness but grimacing—in anger?—when his hand touched a spot above his eye where she had struck him. The knife was on his thigh now, close enough to snatch.

“In Grayport,” he said, “we were desperate. We were poor. Would you believe that I was terrified? I did my best to hide it, from the onset of the sickness I endured aboard the
Cleaver
to the first cold night we hid inside the church. We were victims in a city full of predators and strangers. You remember the pickpocket.”

Molly watched him closely. Did he know the man was dead?

“I found him easily,” Nicholas said, “the night he stole your locket. He was a coward, easily pinched, and I was struck to think the two of us had seemed an easy target. Never in our lives had we been so common, marked by common criminals and bent to common work. We belonged in higher spheres, and I resolved to make it happen. I knew of Kofi Baa from the Customs House. I knew his business and his wealth—they were no great secret—and I knew that he could lift us if his will were so inclined. I paid to have him attacked and played the selfless hero. My injuries were bought: a sensible investment.”

“How could you?” Molly said, recalling Kofi’s smile and his deep, melodious laugh. “After what he did for us!”

“
Before
what he did for us. I chose not to tell you—did you really not suspect?—because I knew you wouldn’t approve, however great the gain.”

“It’s terrible,” she said.

“How?” Nicholas asked. “I never did the man a single stroke of harm. He rewarded me with trust and benefited vastly. Then his colleagues and friends were benefiting, too. I dealt with business woes to start, mostly trade laws and customs, but soon their needs diversified. With every problem solved, my reputation grew. People asked for arbitration. For avoidance of scandal. For extrication from legal, marital, and ethical dilemmas. I helped them as I could and they were satisfied to pay. But everything was built upon my ironclad success. There were problems, now and then, that even I could not resolve, and one can never let the rabble question the magician. So what does the magician do? He makes his own illusions.”

The candle guttered out, sending up a fine, smoky ribbon in the moonlight. Molly’s thoughts weren’t in rhythm with the words he was speaking. She would start to comprehend but then her memory would stutter—back to Grayport, to sitting in the office while he worked, then to waking up tonight and finding him beside her.

“How do you control a blackmailer?” Nicholas continued. “Create one. How do you safeguard a secret? Know it. Whatever is required may be summoned or invented. Put simply, I devised my own worth among my clients. The truest self-reliance generates itself. My work was not so different from the tactics and deceptions we devised for Mrs. Wickware.”

“It’s criminal,” she blurted, feeling stupid as she said it.

“Criminal.” He laughed, sounding casual and warm. “I built the cages, in they went, and I provided them the key. All they lost was money. Each of them could spare it. I hope you aren’t aghast that I meddled with the law. These are men’s laws, malleable and thin: made to bend. They are not the laws of nature. Not the laws of life.”

There was just enough moonlight to see him on the stool. She focused on his leg, first the blood and then the knife.

“We didn’t sail three thousand miles to shiver, and starve, and be the browbeaten victims of the bright new world. We came to be strong. We came to be more. And what other option did we have?” Nicholas asked, leaning forward so his eye, only one, caught the moon. “Think of the bread riot in Umber. Did you not support the wretches who demanded something more? You and I stole apples on the morning we arrived. Then we needed something better, so I took that, too.”

“But then we had enough,” she said. “A home and means to live.”

“Had you known what I was doing—and I wonder how much voluntary blindness dimmed your sight—what would you have done? Confessed to Kofi Baa? Consigned us to a destitute existence or to jail?”

Molly leaned forward, closer to his knee. The moonlight fell upon her own cheek now—cold, white light reminding her of winter, of the Grayport snow she’d eventually adored, of the chocolate she used to sip after shopping in the market. She remembered being happy that she made Kofi happy, and she couldn’t bear the thought of causing him to glower.

Nicholas paused to think, comfortable but stern. He let his question dissipate. She played the timid listener.

“I had such a wealth of work,” he said, “I had to hire help: desperate men and women who were squandering their gifts. You could say I had a staff of hand-picked talent. I gave them work by proxy—very few knew my name—and any caught or compromised were freed, again by proxy, or compelled to hold their tongues. One of my earliest and most reliable employees was the pickpocket. His name was Mr. Crutch: a middling thief who lacked direction when I found him and persuaded him to broaden his ambition. Marry threats of danger to the promise of reward, and any man alive will listen very closely. It was he who attacked Kofi Baa and wounded me, with great care, according to my instructions. I used him often that year.”

“And do you know what you created?” Molly yelled to crack his calm. “Your friend became a Maimer!”

“Molly, you amaze me. I had thought you more astute. Did you think it a coincidence, an accident of fate, that your Maimer was a man who used to visit me in Grayport?”

Molly shrank back, out of the moonlight into the dark. She seemed to spiral and descend, as on the night she’d given birth after swallowing the potion, and she understood that yes, she had known for several minutes now—had sensed it in the slush coldly rolling in her center.

“I learned of it in Grayport, but not the full truth,” he said. “The second Maimer that night—the man whose nose you smashed before escaping up the road—was apparently ashamed to tell me what had happened. He told me they were ambushed by the sheriff and a posse, and that Mr. Crutch was dead before he reached Root. Had I learned a young woman had bested them, ridden off blind, and captured Mr. Crutch singlehanded, I would have known at once my sister was alive.”

Molly whispered with a quarter of her breath, “Tell me why.”

“I’m afraid the Maimers’ origin is lusterless,” he said. “An enterprise that blossomed more than I expected. Many individuals who came to me for help used private couriers to deliver important letters. They were a treasure trove of secrets—personal, professional, and highly confidential. I resolved to offer the city’s only safe delivery. All I had to do was thin the competition. As you know,” he said, “the shortest route between Grayport and Liberty is the road through the forest, and messages were sent despite the perils. If well-paid couriers were not dissuaded by wildcats, bears, and ordinary brigands, what would prompt terror? Shadow men with knives. It is one thing to risk money or belongings, quite another risking the most cherished parts of ourselves. I wish I knew whoever first called them Maimers. They became an instant legend. It was more than I had hoped.

“Once news of the earliest victims reached Grayport, only the bravest couriers would travel on the road. Naturally they charged exorbitant rates, and I targeted the first such man who ventured out. The Maimers blinded him, preventing him from any future rides, and with the information gleaned from one of the letters he’d been carrying, I ruined a prominent trader with evidence of smuggling. People in Grayport grew nervous in the extreme about sending confidential messages. Soon they came to me, the man who solved their problems.

“I offered the swiftest, craftiest couriers: men in my employ. People paid handsomely for guaranteed delivery. I couldn’t freely use the information in the letters—any evidence that I had read them would destroy my reputation—but I learned a great deal of cumulative value. The Maimers were instructed to attack random travelers to remove all suspicion that their motive was the mail. I owned the road and no one knew it.”

The mattress was a sinkhole, cavernously deep. Molly touched her face and patterned it with blood. It smelled of old fear, sickly as a leech. The room was slick with gore, stuffed with tongues and ears and organs, and her head began to swim.

“You’re a fiend,” she said. “Evil.”

“I have intellect and will and opportunities to thrive. Should I not embrace my powers? Flourish in the wild?”

“Do you not have a heart for everyone you’ve hurt?”

“I do not,” Nicholas said, as if he’d thought about the question many times, many ways. “If I once had sympathy for others, I don’t remember losing it. I know I loved our mother—I was shattered when she died, but even then I had the instinct to partially conceal it. And I love you and Frances from a time, long ago, before the openhearted part of me withdrew and disappeared. Why it left me is a mystery. I cannot say I miss it. My love for you and Frances brought only pain.”

He shrank as if the whole of him had atrophied and closed. His shoulders hunched forward and his spine seemed to slacken. When he spoke again, his voice was neither confident nor wise, but neither was it feeble. It was open. It was young.

“All my life,” he said, “I have been beaten down by sickness, and circumstance, and the brutishness of those who deemed themselves stronger. Our father was determined to enfeeble and control me. When we broke Mrs. Wickware, I saw another way. When we finally left home, the world spread before us. And when we first arrived in Grayport—when sickness, circumstance, and commonplace brutes threatened us again—I refused to buckle under. I might have given in to terror and despair. Instead, I took control to shield myself from harm. I’d have shielded you, too—how emphatically I tried!—had you not struggled free and wounded me yourself.”

Molly wobbled to her feet, making Nicholas raise the knife and look at her severely, but all she did was cross the room and stand before the stove. It was three small steps but she was desperate for the distance.

He stood and said, “Have you never done harm to satisfy your needs? Have you never cut a path over someone else’s life?”

“What have I done?” Molly asked, turning around to face him. “How can you suggest—”

“Your refusal to behave led to Frances’s expulsion. We defied Mrs. Wickware and ground her to a pulp, but then you wavered and suggested it was I who lacked compassion. Did you not choose freely when we sailed away from Umber, knowing full well the dangers that awaited? Yet you pouted and complained while I fought to make it work, until at last you opposed me, openly and cruelly. Did you hesitate in trusting John Summer with our secrets? We had safety and prosperity. We finally had a home. What if someone had learned precisely who we were? Think of how a cunning individual could pin us. John Summer understood our delicate position and he used it—did you know?—when he came to me and forced me to consent to your engagement. How could I be certain that he wouldn’t press for more? I sent him north and made sure he never reached Burn. Still your pregnancy remained,” he said, swallowing to overcome a frailty in his voice. “Unmarried, unemployed—you were wholly unprepared. I offered a solution and beseeched you to accept it. You defied me and rejected it, forcing me to carry out the necessary acts.”