She started when Tom entered, lighting her cheek with sun and looking pretty in her cap and blue-striped skirt. She clasped her hands tight for self-reassurance.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she said and stared at him beseechingly, seemingly embarrassed and afraid to disappoint him.
Tom loved his cousin dearly, and he found it as strange to play the role of her protector—she was twenty years old, only seven years younger than himself—as he did to play elder to his middle-aged uncle. But he was far too annoyed to shelter her today.
“You’re needed downstairs,” he said.
“I don’t want to see him.”
“Neither do I, but he’s your father.”
She flushed but it was spirit more than weakness that inflamed her. He could tell because he often had the same flush himself.
“This can’t go on,” Tom said.
“You wouldn’t send me back!”
“What’s the difference if he’s here every day?” But seeing how it panicked her, he added, “You can stay. Send him off and get to work. It’s why you’re living here, remember.”
He left her there to follow him down—he’d give her half a minute—and paused to calm his temper when he reached the bottom of the stairs. He twisted on the handrail and pulled until it creaked, wanting it to hold, expecting it to break. He peeked at Lem and the travelers from the kitchen doorway, found them just as he had left them, and jogged outside to check the boiling copper. Another bee stung his neck; they were furious today. He still had time before the wort needed straining, so he left it once more and went to stabilize the house.
Lem and Bess stood at the bar, bound in intimate whispers, while his cousin poured drinks and placed them on a tray. Tom passed them and continued up front to see the guests.
“I’ve had your company before,” he told the oldest of the group, a man with thinning hair and frizzy gray eyebrows. “Last July, if I remember right. Mr. Hoopworth the banker.”
“A trip on urgent business,” Mr. Hoopworth replied. “Prodigious memory you have!”
“A tavern keep’s memory,” the second man said. He was delicately formed but confidently voiced, dandified with ruffles on his collar and his cuffs.
“It helps to warm a welcome,” Tom answered with a nod. He turned to Mr. Hoopworth again and said, “You liked a cup of smoak.”
“He has talked of little else!” said the lady of the group. She was young and very tall, a spitting image of the dandy to her right—probably his sister. She had sweet, distracting dimples. “He has bound us both to try a cup on penalty of lecture. But what precisely is it?”
“A rich black drink made of strong local nuts,” Mr. Hoopworth explained.
Bess had filled the tray but been delayed by her father. Tom continued with the talk and hoped the travelers wouldn’t notice.
“Is it true that smoak trees are found only in Root?” the lady asked.
“Aye,” Tom said. “Last year a merchant tried growing them in Liberty. Every sapling died. They like it here at home.”
“With your extraordinary weather,” said the dandy. “We have waited several weeks for the road to finally clear.”
“I’m glad of open travel,” Tom said, forcing cheer. “We could do with fuller tables. Any trouble on the way?”
“We have all our vital parts,” the dandy said wryly.
Mr. Hoopworth coughed and gave his companions a censuring frown.
“You mean the Maimers,” said the lady, heating up pink from an over-show of courage. “Mr. Hoopworth worries you will frighten me with horrors.”
Her youthfulness and pluck reminded Tom of Molly, as a bright piece of brass reminds one of gold. He looked toward the door, picturing the Knoxes’ tidy house off the common, where Molly had been staying for the past three weeks and, according to Benjamin, had recovered in body if not entirely in spirit. She still claimed to remember nothing, but although most of the town suspected she was hiding a scandalous past, local interest had diminished owing to the dearth of new developments. Talk was of the Maimers, here and everywhere in Root, and as the last enduring sense of Molly was one of secret trouble, Tom had kept his distance. He had trouble enough already.
“My sister knows the tales,” the dandy said. “She has every right to hear them if she’s traveling the road.”
“I agree,” Tom said. “A person ought to know when someone wants her limbs. There was another attack Wednesday the last. A peddler lost his foot. Before that, they got a lawyer—John Pale—and took his tongue.”
John Pale had stayed a fortnight, terrified to leave, until he finally rode away, in sickly gray silence, with a company of seven armed trappers bound for Grayport.
“It’s terrible,” the lady said. “How is it the victims always come to Root?”
“The Maimers don’t attack close to Grayport or Liberty,” Tom said. “Authorities are thinner out here. Nearly all of the attacks have been within ten miles of the valley.”
“Someone ought to ride out and shoot them,” Mr. Hoopworth said.
“Convince the sheriff,” Tom answered, “and you’ll all drink smoak forever on the house.”
“You could ride out yourself,” said the dandy with a smirk.
Tom took this as bravado, arrogant but harmless. Still, it irked him: he had ridden out, more than once. The dandy plucked a short stray fiber from his jacket, preening as if the Maimers were a coffeehouse diversion.
Tom grinned and looked for Bess.
Lem clutched her arm and held her at the bar. Toughened by her childhood, she fought to struggle loose, but he squeezed so hard her eyes began to shine and the drink tray wavered, threatening to crash.
“Excuse me,” Tom said, turning from the table.
He crossed the room with blood pumping swiftly to his muscles.
“Let her go,” Tom said, grabbing Lem’s free wrist so they formed a kind of chain, familial and tense back beside the bar.
“I need her home,” Lem said.
“I need her serving drinks.”
“She ain’t yours to keep.”
“Nor am I yours,” Bess said, tugging free. Remarkably, she kept the drinks balanced on the tray, though her movement caused the liquid to precariously slosh.
Tom interposed himself so Bess could walk away and said to his uncle, “You’ve seen her. Now go home.”
Lem’s spots began to darken. He chested up close, raised his stubbled chin, and said, “I’ll tear this place to kindling if you don’t send her off.”
“You leave a splinter on the floor and I’ll get my rifle.”
Lem recoiled as if a flash pan had fired in his face. “You would shoot your own blood?”
“Bess is old enough to make her own way,” Tom said.
“I’ve spoken to Sheriff Pitt.”
“There’s nothing he can do.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Lem’s voice had a melodramatic falsity about it, but the threat wasn’t idle. Pitt would stab at any weakness. Tom balled his hand and the bee stings throbbed. He could almost hear his wort boiling over in the yard.
Lem stomped away toward the tavern’s front door. Bess saw him coming and retreated to the hearth, where she held the empty tray before her like a shield. He watched her as he passed and seemed about to speak when he bumped Mr. Hoopworth, who spilled his cup of smoak.
“Keep your woman close,” Lem told the men, “unless you want her stolen.”
The young lady gasped, more at Lem than at his words. The dandy stood defensively beside her with a frown, unsure of how to reply, while Mr. Hoopworth sopped around the table with a napkin, trying to keep the drink from spilling into his lap. Tom approached Lem and was prepared to haul him out, but his uncle bowed dramatically and left without encouragement.
“Lemuel Carver,” Tom said to the guests. “He hasn’t been himself since the pox took his wife.”
Bess suppressed her nerves, rushing to replenish Mr. Hoopworth’s smoak.
Th
e lady blushed at Tom and said, “Here I was fearing Maimers, when it’s you I must be wary of!”
The door was still ajar and Scratch the cat ran in, a streak of ratty fur and scrabble-sharp claws. He hissed running past and sprinted to the kitchen, where they soon heard Nabby yelling strange, ancient curses.
Tom excused himself and said, “I’ll see about your food.”
He left them all in Bess’s care and hurried back to Nabby, who had cornered Scratch in the pantry with a poker from the hearth. Scratch hid behind a barrel, dodging her attack. A slick pink chicken neck quivered in his mouth.
Tom approached Nabby from behind and took the poker, unaware she’d grabbed the fire-heated iron with a cloth. The metal burned his hand, the poker clanked down, and Scratch darted past into the garden with his prize.
“I had him pinned!” Nabby said. “He took the best neck.”
Tom plunged his hand into a bucket of cold water. “I won’t have you killing cats in the kitchen.”
“The beast is not a cat. He was sent, like a curse, and he will give me no rest until—”
“You aren’t ruddy cursed any more than I am,” Tom said, examining his palm with the stings and the burn, and thinking of Lem and Sheriff Pitt, Bess and Molly and the Maimers, and the guests in need of food while the cook chased a cat.
He left Nabby muttering imprecations over the chicken beaks and walked out back. His copper had been tipped. The brew had doused the flames and pooled upon the ground, where the steaming mud revealed to Tom not the markings of a cat, but his uncle’s deep footprints leading to the trees.
* * *
The house of Dr. Benjamin Knox and his wife, Abigail, had sturdy clapboard walls and a high, peaked roof, and it stood upon a quarter-acre plot—mostly gardened—at the corner of Center and Milk Streets in the heart of the close-packed town.
Leafy vines covered the trellis up the side of the house. Molly had watched them grow from nothing during her weeks of convalescence and seen their tendrils uncoil right before her eyes. Spring in Root astonished her. Trees burst green, flowers leapt to bloom, and early fruits and berries looked ripe enough to pick. Breezy warmth, juicy vines—weeks ago, she’d hidden in a snowbound cabin. Had it only been a month since the winter disappeared?
Molly scanned the garden for renegade stalkers. These were short, sinuous weeds that uprooted themselves and crawled with reaching feelers to fatally suck the fluids of the garden’s stationary plants. Benjamin knelt in a shady patch of manure and clipped the newly grown feelers off a mass of writhing stalkers, but many others had spread throughout the garden overnight and had to be collected. They were not to be killed; once crippled and controlled, Benjamin had told her, stalkers clung together and eventually grew leaves of medicinal value. She spotted one now among the skinwort, allowed the feelers to twine around her wrist, and carried it back to Benjamin for pruning and replanting. He cut the feelers with his knife, took the weed, and smiled up at her.
Benjamin was Molly’s only friend in Root—her only friend at all—and for weeks he had kept her close in his care. They breakfasted and supped together, remaining in the garden or the house during the day and then conversing over tea in the parlor every evening. He enjoyed reading music and would often hum the tunes. He had tried for many years to learn the violin but suffered awkward fingers, which also caused him difficulty with writing and, he freely admitted, with stitches and incisions. But just as his medical knowledge compensated for his lack of dexterity, his passion for hearing music on the page compensated, in part, for his inability to play it.
One night the previous week, Benjamin had hummed a piece to himself and Molly had exclaimed, “That’s Flumat!”
Benjamin, much surprised, had double-checked the sheet.
“It is. It is indeed!” he said. “But how is it familiar?”
Molly almost blurted she had learned it from her brother, but she pinched herself fiercely on the wrist and said, “I have a memory for music. Like remembering a dream.”
He waited patiently for more, reading her expression like an unknown cadenza, and the floor appeared to shrink and draw their chairs nearer together. But on that particular evening, his wish to know her secrets paled before his delight at finding a companion, unheard-of in Root, who was acquainted with the music ever playing in his mind. From that night forth, they had spoken of Brondel, Hark, Riber, Frederini, and Gorelli, often reading the sheets together until Molly—much to Abigail’s displeasure—started to hum throughout the day as absentmindedly as Benjamin.
Neither of the Knoxes, Molly knew, believed her memory loss was genuine. Benjamin didn’t press, or rather pressed with gracious care. Abigail, however, came at her with knives.
Just that morning over breakfast, Molly was finishing her eggs when Abigail said, “I have another, if you’re hungry.”
“No, but thank you, Mrs. Knox.”
“A wasted egg. If you are finished with your breakfast, you may help me beat the rugs.”
“I continue to prescribe no strenuous activity after meals,” Benjamin said from behind a month-old newspaper he had borrowed from the tavern.
Abigail pursed her skinny lips—she seemed, in fact, to purse her whole body—and said as she cleared the table, “You encouraged Sarah Crook to go about her work,” referring to an elderly widow who had recently been kicked unconscious by a horse.
“A man in Grayport has invented an optical device,” Benjamin read, “that detects nascent fevers.”
“An honesty device would prove more useful,” Abigail replied.
Molly did her best to finish up her eggs. The hard-boiled yolk clung drily at her windpipe.
Benjamin folded the paper and stared at the wall, seeming to consider the materials of fever glasses. “There are numerous diverse manifestations of mental darkness,” he began.
“Including voluntary,” Abigail said, and promptly left the room.
Molly drank tea and dislodged the egg.
“I am crippling stalkers today,” Benjamin told her with a smile. “Would you like to assist me?”
“Yes,” she said, standing up and looking to the garden.
“She can cripple stalkers but cannot beat a rug,” came Abigail’s voice from two rooms away.
Indeed, Molly did feel strong enough to work when she was asked, or at the very least recovered from her most dramatic symptoms—the tenderness, swelling, and after-bleeding of her pregnancy, which she had struggled to conceal from Benjamin and Abigail. The air today soothed her like a childhood bath. Birds familiar and exotic swooped past, flashing colors: goldfinches, cardinals, something pearl, something blue. She pressed her hands into the earth, enjoying the fatness of the worms and the feel of healthy soil, and yet an emptiness remained, a hollowness of body and of life altogether, as if she had possessed a sixth sense and now, having lost it, found her customary senses too predictable and drab.
She captured the last of the runaway stalkers and watched Benjamin cripple and replant them. The weeds were calmer now, defeated—deprived, like herself, of their ability to flee, but at any rate safe within the good doctor’s care.
“They will root themselves again and grow more docile,” Benjamin said as he tamped the soil with his palms, “so long as they are kept sufficiently moist.”
“The rain will help,” Molly said.
Benjamin stood and cupped his eyes against the daylight. The sky looked enormous: high blue, bright as life, without a single passing cloud or any trace of wind. He tilted his head and asked, “Why do you say it will rain?”
“The blades of grass look sharper and they’re leaning to the west,” Molly said. “I noticed it a week ago, just before a storm.”
“Yes!” Benjamin said, clapping his hands and almost jigging. He rushed her with ebullience, eyeglasses flashing in the sun. “I have noted it a hundred times. The grass begins to point, the leaves raise their palms, and the white-throated sparrows sing a full octave higher.”
Molly had failed to
note the sparrows but believed it was true. She had seen her fill of marvels since journeying to Floria, and even in a country so oddly unfamiliar, Root seemed a brighter cornucopia of wonders. Flower floods, walking weeds, multicolored air—of course the grass and birds heralded the storms.
“Does no one else notice?” Molly asked.
“The pointing grass?”
“The rarity and queerness.”
“Rare and queer! So it is! Most of the townspeople were born here and know of little else. That which travelers and transplants look upon as curious, the locals see as common as the hairs within their nostrils.”
“Are you a transplant?” she asked.
“I was born and breeched in Grayport.”
“Why is Root … different?”
“Why, indeed?” Benjamin replied. “I have notes and observations, legends and accounts, theories geographic, biologic, astronomic. Nowhere else, save perhaps the sea, are the mysteries of nature so abundantly in evidence, to say nothing of our more supernatural phenomena. The presence of ghosts is broadly accepted, and the local Elkinaki tell of a figure in the forest—the Colorless Man—who is strikingly similar to the devil of Scripture. Many in Root claim to have seen him as a thin, crooked shadow in the trees, in their dreams, or at the ends of their own benighted beds. Their stories are amazingly consistent, but how does one substantiate the wholly insubstantial?”
“Why are you whispering?” Molly asked.
“Abigail’s hearing is acute,” Benjamin said, leaning closer. “She tolerates my inquisitiveness to a degree, but she is devoutly Lumenist and considers my probing into spiritual matters prideful, even insolent to God.”
“But do you believe in such things? Ghosts and crooked shadow men?”
“Truth often hides within a skein of superstition. Nabby, the cook at the Orange, is a fount of numinous wisdom and is, herself, almost supernaturally long-lived … But that reminds me! The nyx is efflorescing.” Benjamin crossed the garden to a blossoming purple shrub. He cut a sprig with his knife and held it up to show her. “Nabby insists the petals, rubbed upon her eyelids, allow her to discover witches in disguise. It flowers only for a day—even now, the bloom is fading. I must take it to her at once or she will grouse at me the whole year through,” he said with a smile. “I think you may accompany me today. You have been cooped up enough and must be curious to see beyond the window of the parlor.”
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