Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  Tremendous galloped on. Molly kept her eyes shut and reveled in the dark. The heat had grown thick and they were slicing it apart. She felt the pollen in her mouth and summer spreading wide, the explosion of a million bright blossoms all around her. The meadow went forever—it was better than a dream, how they flew without restraint and hovered off the grass.

  She sensed panic in Tremendous, opened her eyes, and saw the hedges. They were thirty feet away and coming up fast and she remembered that they weren’t merely hedges but a wall, five feet of stone with a covering of ivy.

  Just beyond stood the manor. Molly held her breath. It was too late to stop and she imagined floating up. Tremendous read her mind and they were perfectly in sync; they were lighter than a lark and sailing off the ground.

  * * *

  Born to wealth and bred to power, Lord Bell was an only child whose parents had been murdered in the peasant uprising of 1730. His father had been a rapacious landlord and had paid the ultimate price for oppressing the tenant farmers on the family’s vast estate.

  Lord Bell was more pragmatic. He collected the rents, kept the peace, and earned the farmers’ goodwill despite contempt for their existence. As one of the wealthiest landowners in Bruntland, he commanded more respect than many of the country’s true nobility, and after dabbling in politics and establishing himself within the higher spheres of power, he craved an opportunity for military glory.

  This morning he stood in the manor’s sunstruck conservatory, a glass-paneled room with marble floors and luxurious ferns, discussing the war with General Graves.

  The general’s regal posture hid the quiver in his jowls, his liver spots, and the frailty that had disappointed Lord Bell on first impression. Now, as the general spoke with the wisdom of experience, fiery of voice and solid as a statue, it was rather like standing in the presence of the king.

  “Fort Divine was cowardice,” General Graves said. “An absolute disaster, inexcusable and rash. Food and arms to last a month, and Chesterson surrenders to a hundred savages and half as many Rouge. He claims he had no choice, that Smith abandoned him by staying put in Haverdown, that he preferred to lose a fort rather than see it pounded by artillery. Artillery the Rouge did not possess. Their cannons had been mired twenty miles west. By all accounts, the fort was barely nicked, yet Chesterson surrendered our last and best defense of the Switchback and now the Rouge can sail their battleships and bloody fucking pleasure boats halfway to Bloom completely unopposed. He’s been ransomed and relieved of his command and now he’s back in Umber, charming women and children with tales of his adventures. The Kraw should have scalped him,” General Graves declared. “He could have doffed his hair and been the toast of every drawing room in Bruntland.”

  He faced the tall, open doors and looked toward the sky, as if the ivied wall alone divided the conservatory from the field of battle three thousand miles away in Floria.

  “Though what does it matter?” he continued, so softly that the question might have been rhetorical. He turned to look at Bell with the sun upon his back, like a veteran philosopher exhausted by the light. “I have seventeen grandchildren. The youngest is a fortnight old. His name is Adam—he has his mother’s hair. Yet here I stand despairing of a fort half a world away.”

  “The empire—”

  “Yes, the empire.” Graves smiled, as if Bell were one of his newly minted progeny: adorably naïve. “And what if all of Floria becomes New Rouge? I have seen our empire triple in size, and every time it’s grown, so has our expense in life and coin and bloody obligation. I have a manse with fifty servants and a county with a hundred working families, but do I occupy the manse to gather up the rents, or do I gather up the rents to occupy the manse?”

  “Every child brings expense,” Bell said.

  “Parenting and warring are for younger generations. I leave the diapers to my daughters and the regiments to men like you. But you need to understand we may have lost Floria already.”

  “I have studied the maps,” Bell said. “If Fort Élan were captured, we would sever—”

  “Maps.” Graves sighed. “They never show you swamps and clouds of stinging flies. They never show you war parties, or cowardly sons of whores like Chesterson. And yet for all I know anymore, you may be just the man to save our precious Floria. We need a stroke of will. We need some bloody spirit.”

  A shadow rose behind him as he said it, gargantuan and filling up the high open doorway.

  Bell seized Graves and yanked him to the side; the general’s bony elbow cracked a pane of glass. A horse thundered down, fracturing the tiles, and they cowered from the snorting and the huge rippling flank. Molly sat above them, with her head near the ceiling, and her wild hair and wide dark eyes were so outrageously alive that Bell might have shot her if his pistol were at hand.

  “What the devil!” Graves shouted.

  Molly dropped the reins. The stallion quieted and clacked more gently on the floor. She rubbed his mane and gracefully dismounted, staring fearfully at Bell until he jostled her aside and reached toward the horse.

  The creature pinned its ears and bumped him into Molly. They were trapped against the wall and Bell expected any moment to be kicked, to be bloodied in an avalanche of glass. Molly squeezed free, threw her arms around the horse’s neck, and softened its aggression with a word he couldn’t hear.

  “My God,” Graves stammered from the corner of the room. “You might have been killed.”

  “I’m fine,” Bell said with barely checked fury.

  “You, young miss,” Graves corrected, glancing warily at Bell as if his disregard for Molly were an omen of his newly bought command.

  Molly answered the general in a tone best described as cavalier, but once again Bell failed to hear what she was saying, distracted as he was by the riot in his mind, and by the time he straightened his coat and calmed the tremor in his limbs, his daughter and General Graves had fallen into rapt conversation.

  “This is Tremendous,” Molly said.

  “I dare say it is!” Graves answered.

  Bell approached him to apologize—and drag away his daughter—but he couldn’t find a way around the great wall of horse.

  “I was riding with my eyes closed,” Molly told the general.

  “With your eyes closed. Remarkable,” Graves said. “That has to be a four-foot wall.”

  “Five,” Molly said. “He didn’t even clip it!”

  The two of them continued this way for several minutes, even when the horse urinated freely, splattering the tiles with his great black penis. The smell was overpowering, the flow a minor river. Bell stood bristling through the whole conversation, staring at his daughter as his blood pressure rose but failing to communicate his violent displeasure.

  “The question now is how to get him out,” Graves said, openly delighted by the strangeness of the problem.

  “If we get a running start from the far end of the room,” Molly said, “or better still the hall—”

  “The staff will handle the horse,” Bell said.

  “Ah, there you are, Bell,” Graves said, acting like he truly had misplaced him. “Your daughter here is quite the flash of fire,” he continued, winking at Molly as if he had just met his eighteenth grandchild.

  “General Graves,” Bell said, going so far as to seize the man’s arm and lead him to the door. “I must insist that we continue in the study.”

  “I sincerely hope you’ll join us,” Graves said to Molly.

  “She will not—”

  “Of course she will,” Graves decided, chuckling now at Bell’s apparent temper. “I should like to hear your feelings on the troubles in Floria,” he said to Molly, who at least had the sense to look at her father for permission. It was not directly granted.

  “But we can’t leave Tremendous here alone,” Molly said.

  “Perhaps you would escort me to the study,” Graves said, “while your father and the staff see about your horse.”

  * * *

 
“Father sat and listened for an hour,” Nicholas said, “while the two of you talked about horses?”

  “General Graves asked him questions now and then,” Molly said. “We also talked about Floria and ocean travel.”

  “And then the general left?”

  “It wasn’t that abrupt.”

  “It must have seemed so to Father. He’s been waiting all week to chew the general’s ear.”

  “It’s true,” Frances said, sitting in a rocking chair and sewing silver buttons onto a shirt. “I found him in the night, quarter past three, poring over maps and planning what to say. ‘I have it,’ he said as I was bringing him a sherry. Said the whole war was plain as day, plain as day. He acted right certain that the general would agree.”

  “Instead he spent an hour listening to Molly,” Nicholas said, bottling his mirth until his eyes began to pool. He had color in his cheeks, a flush that even the sun, searing every day throughout the hot Bruntish summer, had failed to raise as fully as his sister’s wondrous story. “What happened to Tremendous?”

  “Burke and Stevens led him out.”

  “How?” Frances asked. “The conservatory leads—”

  “Directly to the hall,” Nicholas said. “And from the hall they must have led him—”

  “Through the study.” Molly laughed. “The three of us were sitting there, talking over biscuits, when they opened up the door and walked him past the table.”

  Frances clapped her mouth, rigid at the thought. Nicholas erupted and his laughter—boyish and ebullient, so at odds with his cadaverous demeanor—tickled Frances’s nerves and set her laughing just as fully. It was worth every penalty their father would decree to hear them both laughing like a pair of giddy children.

  “Your poor father,” Frances finally said, sweating from the unaccustomed fun at his expense.

  “Bah,” Nicholas said. “He hoped to make an impression. What more could he ask?”

  The trio laughed again, louder than before, with the humid little drawing room cushioning the sound. Molly knelt to lay her head upon her governess’s lap.

  “Mind the needle,” Frances said.

  Nicholas grew preoccupied, losing all his jollity. Molly wondered at her brother’s studious expression.

  “Will he still go abroad?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Nicholas said.

  “And we’ll be rulers of the house.”

  “I will be the ruler of the house,” Frances answered. “I hope you treat me kinder than you treat your father.”

  “We’ll treat you like our mother,” Nicholas said.

  Frances held her breath and put the needle in her cushion. Molly looked at her, assuming she was basking in the sentiment, but Frances and her brother turned their heads toward the door. There were footsteps steadily approaching in the hall, the claps so sharp Molly wondered if Tremendous might have somehow found his way back inside the house.

  Her father opened the door.

  “Get off the floor,” he said to Molly. “Frances, you may go.”

  Molly wobbled when she stood; the sudden rise swirled her head. She had hurried from the study when her father walked outside to see the general into his carriage, and she had done her best—successfully till now—to drive away the fear of what would happen to her horse.

  “It wasn’t Tremendous’s fault,” she said, wishing that her voice were not so childishly high. “You always say the rider is to blame if there’s an accident. I was reckless, it was me. I will write to General Graves, apologizing—”

  “No,” Bell said, with something like a smirk. He smiled so rarely, the expression was difficult to read and so it scared her, as thoroughly as Nicholas’s laughter had enchanted her.

  Bell stepped aside to let Frances out. She slipped around him with a nod. He was curiously blank, refusing to acknowledge the governess but almost, with a lowering of his chin, seeming drained when she was gone and he had shut the door behind her.

  Nicholas stood without a sound, eyes fixed upon their father.

  “As it happens,” Bell began, “General Graves thinks highly of my powers of authority. Give us a thousand soldiers like your daughter, he said, and the continent is ours. He was jesting, of course, and yet he trusts in my ability to lead, to build a regiment as spirited and strong as I have built our little family. If your intention was to drive him off and keep me safe at home, I am afraid that you have failed.”

  “You have your command,” Nicholas said.

  “I do,” Bell replied. “But here I am, preparing to go, and how can I leave you here alone, leaping horses into rooms and God knows what?”

  Molly breathed deeply, trying to enlarge herself. “I promise to behave as long as you’re away. You can trust me.”

  “I most certainly cannot.” Bell laughed but it sounded more contemptuous than mirthful. “You would turn the whole house into a wild gypsy carnival.”

  “I will govern Molly,” Nicholas said.

  Bell regarded him and sighed with wary, chilled respect. “You have always had a will and I have always had to guide it. I have half a mind to take you overseas when I embark.”

  Nicholas blanched even whiter than his ordinary pallor.

  Bell rubbed his jaw and seemed to honestly consider it. At last he shook his head and said, “Your health is unreliable. The trip alone would kill you. I am forced to leave you here, not quite a man and not quite a boy. You lack the sure-footed wisdom to run a household, and your lenience with Molly is a long-abiding weakness. The two of you together … no, it simply won’t do.”

  “Frances…,” Molly said, as if her father had forgotten.

  Nicholas, however, saw the danger in an instant. “No,” he said, stepping up firmly to their father, one hand limp, the other fisted at his side.

  “In recent weeks,” Bell said, “as I anticipated my departure, I thought a great deal of Frances’s ensconcement, shall we say, and of the virtues of her character. Devotion. Predictability. Familiarity. She is popular with the staff, respected and obeyed.”

  “Loved,” Molly said.

  “Yes, loved,” Bell agreed. “But like a child on a stallion, she is far too apt to let the reins slip away. I have hired a new governess, Mrs. Wickware, who brings a sterling reputation and extensive experience—”

  “You can’t,” Molly said, gasping through her tears.

  “It is done,” her father answered. “I will speak to Frances now, before we travel back to the city, giving her time to make arrangements and—”

  “You’re sending her away?” Nicholas said.

  “I must.”

  Molly marveled at her brother’s instantaneous composure.

  “You require someone stronger,” Nicholas conceded. “With Mrs. Wickware in charge, Frances might remain and fill another position.”

  “Impossible,” their father said. “She is, as you have noted, much beloved by the staff. In matters of debate, they would defer to her rather than to Mrs. Wickware. A house cannot be governed in a state of ambiguity, any more than Floria can bow to two crowns. But you need not worry over Frances. I have found her an excellent position in Crookbury. As I said, I am not unappreciative—”

  “You are a fiend,” Nicholas said.

  “How dare you!”

  “No, you can’t!” Molly yelled. “You can’t, it isn’t fair!”

  “It is necessary,” Bell declared, ignoring Molly’s sobs and staring with ferocity at Nicholas, father and son nose to nose and locked as if their gazes were hypnotic, even fatal.

  “She’s like our mother,” Molly said.

  “But she is not!” Bell erupted. “Your mother died fourteen years ago.”

  “So did you,” Nicholas said.

  Bell struck him backhand, cutting his cheek with a ring and knocking him down with fearful ease. Molly ran to hold him, Nicholas hugged her back, and they protected each other in a knot of hands and elbows. Bell loomed above them, his gleaming boot tainted with the horse’s stale urine and his nostrils fl
aring open, audible and vulgar.

  “I hate you,” Molly said. “You’re awful, I despise you.”

  Bell was startled by her vehemence and backed toward the door. The frame boxed him in, both confining and enlarging him. “If your defiance has resulted from an overwarm attachment to your governess,” he said with overwrought composure, “I am required to warn Frances’s new employers, who have children of their own and may object—”

  “No,” Molly said, clenching up tight. “No, it’s us. Only us.”

  “Very well,” Bell said.

  Nicholas remained silent, his face so immobile as to resemble the plaster death masks he’d studied as a child, causing Bell to shiver as he pivoted, exited the room, and left his son and daughter huddled on the floor.

  * * *

  Molly appealed to her father incessantly. She waylaid him on the stairs, and in the stables, and at the end of each day in his private room where he was bound to return, exhausted and irritable, to face yet another of her heartfelt pleas. His usual response being silence or avoidance, she resorted to flagrant disobedience—refusing to pack for their journey back to the city, failing to change her clothes or tidy her hair, and most of all knocking, and calling, and singing childish songs whenever she encountered a locked room and knew that he was just beyond the door.

  It was no use. Lord Bell put her off without acknowledgment or rage, ordering servants to pack her bags as she pursued him through the house, until she finally despaired and ceased to badger him completely, spending all the time she could in the company of Frances.

  Nicholas appealed to the staff, taking his time with each and wringing their hearts with recollections of Frances’s qualities—her kindness, her reliability, and her advocacy, at one time or another, on every servant’s behalf—to rally their support. Lord Bell was unaccustomed to revolt; perhaps great dissent would force him to reconsider, if only to ensure law and order in the home. But Nicholas’s words had the opposite effect, reminding everyone from the grooms to the maids that even a woman as peerless as Frances wasn’t guaranteed the favor of their master. The servants doubled their efforts to appease Lord Bell and keep themselves secure, leaving Nicholas and Molly unsupported in rebellion.