Bell Weather (9 page)

“You have been my whole life,” Frances said to them at last, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and folding it again with heartbreaking care. “I loved your mother dearly and have tried my best to honor her.”

“You did,” they said together.

“I’ll think of you and pray for you and
oh,
” Frances moaned, her words bubbling over into fresh red sobs. “I will love you till I die!”

They hugged her once more and glued together in the sun.

When Frances pulled away, Molly felt as if her lungs had been extracted through her chest. She wobbled with the smudgy glare of August all around her, hyperventilating awfully in the swelter, and the dust, and the evaporating safety of her governess’s care. Frances climbed into the carriage, took her seat, and closed the door. She faced straight ahead and didn’t acknowledge them again.

Stevens cleared his throat and snapped the horses into action, giving the siblings a look of reassurance and apology. Molly and Nicholas watched until the carriage turned a bend. It disappeared behind meringue trees that quivered in the heat, and then they walked arm in arm, up the white stone steps, to where the hall beyond the door looked impenetrably black.

*   *   *

The Bells left the country manor and traveled home to the baked grime of Umber, where in spite of the smoke and dust, the lunarite buildings looked unnaturally pristine. It was white upon white from the towers to the monuments, each grand home as solid as a courthouse. The haze combined with the sun to make everything both blearier and brighter, and the flowers in the green at Worthington Square were as vivid as the paints of a semi-swirled palette. The family had scarcely arrived and settled back in the mansion when Molly and Nicholas, still reeling from the sudden loss of Frances, were made to see their father off, too. He had business to conclude that required several days’ travel outside the city and, as he had already sent his luggage to Umber Harbor, he could finish his rounds directly at the ship and embark for Floria without the inconvenience of returning home to make his farewell.

The city air afflicted Nicholas’s lungs—he rarely left the house in late summer and spent an hour each day breathing camphorated vapor—so, instead of seeing Lord Bell into his post chaise, the siblings met him in the study to say their goodbyes. Dust motes floated like the residue of smoke, constricting Molly’s chest and all but suffocating her brother.

Lord Bell stood in his violet coat, scabbard at his hip and tricorne squarely on his wig. A portrait of their mother smiled gently from the wall behind his head. She was beautiful, their mother, softened by the oil paint with plump cheeks and ringlets in her hair. It was the truest likeness that remained, and every year the resemblance between mother and daughter had grown until today, when Molly entered the room, it might have been a mirror rather than a painting. Nicholas, too, resembled their mother more than he did Lord Bell, who examined his children now as if they could have been the offspring of some other man.

“I am sorry,” Bell said with martial hardness, “truly sorry to be leaving with hostility between us. I have done what I believe is best, not only for the household, but for you and for my own peace of mind. You question my devotion and my love. They are real. I leave for war more concerned for your welfare than for my own, more concerned about your safety than for that of the men within my regiment. And so I leave you in the very best care that I am able, in the hope that I will find you well kept when I return.”

Molly watched the handle of his saber while he spoke. The steel in his voice had forced her eyes down, and now that he was done, his words seemed to ring through the quiet of the room. Bell himself seemed muted by the speech he had given, by the silence and paralysis that followed in its wake. They might have stood forever if he hadn’t looked at Nicholas and offered him his hand, rigid but emphatic.

“Goodbye,” Bell said, sounding hoarse, even choked.

Nicholas neither moved nor spoke. He did however stare—fiercely, imperturbably—until their father’s hand sank to his side and his scalp crept back, smoothing out his forehead. It made Bell’s face more boyish than his son’s, open where the latter’s was determinedly locked.

Molly struggled not to wilt when the focus turned to her. Heat brought fine bright needles to her skin. Bell kissed her head, just above the hairline, and though he must have said goodbye she didn’t register the word. By the time she cleared her thoughts and realized he had moved, her father had stridden across the room and almost reached the door. He looked smaller from the distance—a pint-sized figure in his ornamented coat, off to win a war, packaged like a present. He would soon face the ocean and the tumult of the colonies, the naturals and the Rouge and violence and death. How his uniform would shear beneath a hatchet or a knife! How a musket ball would perforate his fine white shirt.

“Father,” Molly said.

He faced her from the door. She ran to him and hugged him and he staggered from the blow. He found his footing, mumbled a sound, and squeezed her back as if to crush her with the handle of his saber grinding on her thigh. She listened to his stomach roiling through his vest, felt his breath begin to shudder and his heartbeat rise. When she unlocked her grip and leaned back to see his face, he had an aura, faint pink, from a sconce behind his head.

“Be good,” he said.

“I will,” Molly whispered.

He touched her on the cheek and left her at the door. Molly turned around and Nicholas seemed a hundred feet off beside the mantel. He coughed harshly into his sleeve. Molly crossed the room and rubbed him on the back. He took a stabilizing breath and looked at her intently.

“You surprised him.”

“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “I should have been more like you.”

“No,” Nicholas said. “Loving him is strong.”

“Then why did you—”

“I have other kinds of strength.”

“But you still love—”

“You. You’re my only—” he began, but he was racked by another round of coughs and didn’t finish.

She wondered if he meant to say sister, hope, or weakness.

Chapter Seven

“Sit up,” Mrs. Wickware instructed Molly again, “and spread your butter more gently.”

Their new governess was a middle-aged beauty with blond hair, pale green eyes, and a single piece of jewelry: a white-gold ring in memory of her husband. The siblings were eating breakfast at the long mahogany table in the sky-blue dining room. Molly and Mrs. Wickware sat at either end, and Nicholas sat in the middle, on the side near the windows. A band of morning sun cut the tabletop in two.

Molly was ravenously hungry. Mrs. Wickware fed them far less than they were accustomed to eating, and most of their meals included foods that spoiled Molly’s appetite. This morning it was tea and toast, a boiled egg, and a kipper. The kipper was beautifully prepared but Molly loathed the taste of fish: an aversion Mrs. Wickware considered both unnatural and curable.

This morning the governess spoke to Nicholas at length about his health.

“I wonder that your father failed to recognize the problem,” Mrs. Wickware said. “Excessive hours in the library, a musty room without windows, lacking sun and open air, have been the
cause
of your infirmities, rather than relief from their effects. The remedy is exercise. Exercise and work.”

Nicholas sipped his tea with an unsteady hand, looking grayer and weaker than the time, seven years ago, when he had nearly died of an undiagnosed ailment of the blood. In the weeks since Mrs. Wickware’s arrival, he had endured a daily regimen of work and strenuous movement that Molly believed was threatening to kill him. He dusted, swept, hauled firewood, boiled linen, emptied chamberpots, and mucked the horses’ stalls, beginning at sunrise and finishing at dusk, his only rest coming at meals and thirty minutes of reading before he slept. It was enough to grind a healthy man down, but Nicholas had struggled through—gasping, coughing, often collapsing—not only without complaint but with the zeal of a happy convert. Still, the strain had left him wan.

“If you cannot sit up straight, you will stand,” Mrs. Wickware said to Molly.

The governess motioned to her manservant, Jeremy, a swarthy clod whose jaw accounted for nearly half of his enormous, square head. He seemed perpetually uneasy in a fine set of clothes and frequently adjusted his collar and his cuffs. Jeremy rarely spoke, appeared to think even less, and was content to stand aside and wait for clear instructions.

He grabbed Molly’s chair and tipped her off the seat before returning to his place several steps behind her. Nicholas focused on Mrs. Wickware throughout, having pondered and agreed with her assessment of his health. Molly stood and cracked her egg on the corner of the table. She meant to eat it whole—how she loved a boiled egg!—but Mrs. Wickware laid her silverware down and stared at the broken shell that Molly had strewn around her setting.

“Delicate foods for delicate manners,” the governess said. Her skin looked as lovely as the egg in Molly’s hand, and at the subtlest smile on her dainty pink lips, Jeremy took the egg away before it could be eaten. “Nicholas may have it,” Mrs. Wickware said. “Molly may have Nicholas’s kipper.”

“I already have a bloody kipper!” Molly said, close to tears.

Her objection was ignored as if she hadn’t really spoken. Jeremy delivered her egg to Nicholas, who accepted it with a nod, and then he took the second kipper from Nicholas’s plate and placed it next to Molly’s. He licked his fingers clean and waited for further instruction.

“Eat,” Mrs. Wickware said.

“No,” Molly answered.

“If you refuse to eat them now, you will see them again at midday. You will have nothing but kippers until you have learned to accept what you are given.”

So it went with all of Mrs. Wickware’s punishments—repetition, multiplication, more and more of the same. Molly longed to sit in her chair and finish her toast and tea.

“I’d rather starve,” she said.

“They say a starving man will eat his own boot before he dies,” Mrs. Wickware replied. “You will surely eat fish before the day is done.”

Molly tossed her kipper to the middle of the table, but before she could throw the second, Jeremy caught her arms and pinned her wrists behind her back. His grip was so strong she couldn’t free herself or turn. Nevertheless she tried, flinging her hair about and stomping.

“Enough,” Mrs. Wickware said to Jeremy, who gave himself an extra few seconds to comply.

Molly rubbed her wrists and backed away from the table.

“In my busy years as governess,” Mrs. Wickware said, “I have come to know a great many young women and men. Your strengths are not unique. Neither are your failings. You no doubt think yourself extraordinary, for it is a trait that young people share: the conviction that their youth is startling and new. But I cannot be surprised, Molly. I have seen it all before, and I intend to lead you firmly to predictable maturity.”

Molly looked to Nicholas and watched him finish his egg. Instead of acknowledging the argument, he said to Mrs. Wickware, “May I please be excused? I need to tidy my room before dusting the frames in the garret.”

“The frames in the
gilt room.
There aren’t any portraits in the garret,” Mrs. Wickware corrected, disappointed he would make such a ludicrous mistake.

“Yes,” Nicholas said, bowing his head and smiling at his foolishness. “I’m sorry, yes. The gilt room.”

Mrs. Wickware excused him. He folded his napkin next to his plate, straightened his chair, and left the dining room.

Molly watched him go, picturing the garret.

*   *   *

Molly sat alone in her room, where she was supposed to be writing copies of the household schedules and rules. She had been told to copy them once on the first day of Wickware’s reign, and the number had doubled with each refusal—two, four, eight, sixteen, and now the ridiculous thirty-two, which may as well have been thirty-two hundred as far as Molly was concerned. The sole reason she remained in the room was that to be caught elsewhere in the house would lead to Jeremy hauling her back, locking her in, and staying at her side the rest of the afternoon. So she sat at the window overlooking the street, jealous of the midday action there below: gentlemen in hats, ladies riding carriages, children unfettered in the late summer air.

Then she spotted Mrs. Wickware and Nicholas leaving the house to purchase leeches at the market. They would be gone for more than an hour, and as her hunger had grown unbearable, she decided to risk escape and crept downstairs, moving furtively and listening for Jeremy’s plodding footfalls.

She entered the kitchen with its cool stone floor. Vegetables and herbs were strewn across the tables, cheese and feathered foul dangled from the rafters, and a glorious wholesome stew burbled in a cauldron. Two fresh pies—crushberry and apple—puffed aroma from the knife-slit X’s in their crusts.

“You mustn’t be here!” said the kitchen maid, Emmy, a girl of Molly’s age who happened to be the cook’s own daughter. The two of them looked at Molly with startled expressions and identical snub noses, the younger holding a broom, the elder with a cleaver.

“We have instructions,” said the cook, “not to slip you any food.”

“I’m given kippers,” Molly said. “You know I hate kippers.”

“And who do you think prepares ’em?” asked the cook, looking wry. “I use the very best butter I can find to make ’em flavorful, and all of it to waste, all of it returned.”

She resumed cutting mutton to avoid Molly’s face, sorry that she couldn’t cook the siblings what they wanted.

“Mrs. Wickware told us you was copying the rules,” Emmy said.

“Which we’re waiting for to read,” the cook snapped, redder than the mutton she was carving on the block. “Though we know the rules already and we don’t intend to flout ’em.”

“What if Jeremy finds you here?” Emmy asked, sweeping a circle at her feet and listening, like her mother and Molly, for heavy-footed steps.

“We’ll be sacked, same as Stevens,” said the cook, cutting both Molly and the mutton simultaneously.