Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  “Jacob!” Molly cried.

  Nicholas smiled coyly. His carrier had the misshapen nose and knuckles of a boxer, but he placed her brother upright in a chair as gently as he might have placed a child. Nicholas’s forearm was crudely wrapped and bloody.

  “What happened?” Molly asked, kneeling at his feet.

  Nicholas gave her a look as if to say: Best behavior.

  Kofi handed the swarthy man a large silver coin and said, “We thank you for your efforts.”

  The man bowed and left.

  Kofi closed the door and said to Molly, “Please allow me to explain so your husband may collect himself. This evening I followed a familiar shortcut after business at the Customs House, unwise of me in retrospect, and found myself at knifepoint, alone beyond the docks, at the mercy of a brigand who demanded all I had. He seemed inclined to use the knife when your husband, silent as a grave cat, tackled him and grappled with the man upon the ground. I admit to being startled by the unexpected rescue. By the time I gained my wits, the villain had escaped. Your husband broke his ankle and was slashed along the arm.”

  Tackled, Molly thought, and grappled on the ground? If not for the sincerity of Kofi Baa’s telling, she’d have laughed at the absurdity. Her brother in a brawl!

  “I used my handkerchief to bind the wound,” Kofi said, “and summoned a passing jack, just departed, to assist us.”

  “But you must see a doctor!” Molly told her brother.

  Nicholas touched her cheek, very like a spouse.

  “I have already sent for one,” Kofi said. “He will be ably stitched and splinted.”

  “Thank you,” Nicholas told him. “Molly, don’t be frightened. We could all use a drink, if I may trouble you to pour.”

  “Yes, of course,” Molly mumbled, suddenly aware of the flat’s crooked squalor. It was tiny and dim with cracked plaster walls, a very low ceiling with a fur of old salt, and no furniture aside from the table, chairs, and two lumpy mattresses positioned near the stove.

  Molly uncorked their one bottle of wine and poured it into a pair of cups—the only two they owned—for Nicholas and their guest. Kofi recognized the shortage and said, “Formality should never do disservice to a lady.”

  He handed her his cup, gave the second cup to Nicholas, bowed to each in turn, and drank directly from the bottle. Then he encouraged Molly to sit while he stood beside the stove, making easy conversation while they waited for the doctor.

  Nicholas spoke of the Customs House—small talk, at first, to pass the empty minutes but increasingly precise as Kofi asked questions. They spoke of trade with New Solido, of markets still reeling from the war against the Rouge. Nicholas clarified a thorny regulation concerning the export of lumber and shared a loophole, little known but perfectly legal, that would save Kofi a great deal of trouble.

  “Once again I am indebted for your help,” Kofi said. “You must allow me to perform some service in return.”

  Here, Molly thought, was the chance she had prayed for. But Nicholas looked abashed, showing a strange combination of humility and pride, and seemed about to decline when they were interrupted by the arrival of the doctor.

  He was a tightly wound, squinty little man of roughly sixty, brisk in social niceties but masterful in skill. Molly and Kofi watched as he examined Nicholas’s injuries—the ankle was not so badly broken, but the cut was rather deep—and her brother closed his eyes and went to a place of abstract thought, wincing only slightly, as the doctor sewed his arm with a long, arced needle.

  Molly warmed to Kofi. He was gentle and expansive and accorded her the mannerly attention of a suitor. To lie to his face seemed grossly disrespectful. Nevertheless she did, telling the well-practiced story she had used since the Cleaver, because although they had meant to live as brother and sister in the city, their artificial marriage had gained a life of its own. They had foolishly presented themselves to their landlady as husband and wife, and it was she who had introduced Nicholas to a clerk she knew in the Customs House—a clerk who found the married “Jacob Smith” a good position. Now a mounting house of cards was built upon the lie, and so she told Kofi Baa that her parents were deceased; that Jacob, born to affluence, had married her against his family’s wishes; and that they had sailed for Grayport to start a life upon their own terms, however great the struggle.

  Kofi, too, had sailed away from home when he was young.

  “My great mistake was pride,” he said, widening his stance. “Refusing any aid, I almost starved when I arrived. But certain forms of charity are not the same as pity. Had I not been offered help and seen the opportunity, I might have sailed home, sorely beaten by the world.”

  The doctor finished sewing Nicholas’s arm. He secured the fractured ankle, first with a bandage and then with a wooden splint, clad in leather, that fit together as a two-piece shell around the leg. Nicholas thanked him, as did Molly, but the doctor packed his instruments and seemed not to hear, the way a joiner might ignore a newly finished chair. He laid a cheap wooden crutch in Nicholas’s lap.

  Kofi escorted him out and paid him on the stairs, and then he walked back in and clasped Nicholas’s hand.

  “I must be off,” Kofi said, “but this will not be forgotten.” The timbre of his voice warmed Molly’s bones. “I will see you at the Customs House tomorrow afternoon, when again”—here he bowed—“I will ask for your assistance.”

  “I look forward to it,” Nicholas said. “Will you be safe walking home?”

  “My father used to say, ‘Fools are luckier than cowards.’” He kissed Molly’s hand between her first and second knuckles. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Smith.”

  “You as well, Mr. Baa.”

  She saw him out, closed the door, and waited until his footsteps were safely off the stairs. When a very long sigh failed to dissipate the tension, Molly mussed her hair like an uncouth child. She kicked her shoes across the floor and strode toward her brother, who was sliding off the chair, peaked and depleted.

  Molly gawked at him and said, “What on earth just happened?”

  “Fortune paid a visit,” Nicholas replied.

  * * *

  Nicholas studied his cast and seemed amazed by what had occurred. He explained to Molly that he had been delayed an extra hour at the Customs House and left after dark. Eager to reach the printer who had advertised a job, he took a shortcut between the storehouses at the far end of the dockyard and noticed, near a shadowy stack of crates, a well-dressed man being cornered by a thief. Discovering the crime triggered something primal. He ran swiftly and tackled the assailant without thought, emboldened, he supposed, by his capture of the locket thief several days before.

  “It galls me,” Nicholas said, “that rogues play with gold while you and I, of better character, sup with wooden spoons. I vowed in Umber that I wouldn’t let us fall to disadvantage. Tonight, as with the locket thief, I exercised my strength.”

  His ankle had been broken in the fight but he hadn’t felt the cut, not until the assailant—much surprised—fled for safety and left Nicholas and Kofi on their own. Molly visualized the scene but struggled to digest it. The knife could just as easily have plunged through Nicholas’s heart. She made him promise to desist from fighting all the city’s villains, and late in the night, once he was asleep, she wondered what she would have done in his place. It seemed inevitable that dangers would continue to beset them, that eventually she’d have to face a threat on her own.

  Nicholas hobbled to work the following day and returned that night with extraordinary news. True to his word, Kofi Baa had met him at the Customs House, not only with additional questions about lumber and fur exportation, but with a great many questions about Nicholas himself.

  Mr. Baa controlled numerous ventures in Grayport, among them a translation office whose sole employee had recently died of gangrene. Reliable translation of foreign correspondence was increasingly vital with so many thriving markets and overseas contracts, and upon determining that Nicholas did
not desire a future in the Customs House, Kofi offered him not only the dead man’s position but also the newly vacant quarters over the office. The salary was modest but the rent would be waived; the office was located in the better part of the city, only minutes from the best markets; and Nicholas, so often ill, could go to work on bitter days simply by walking downstairs. To quell the fear of charity, Kofi explained that Nicholas’s erudition, polyglotism, and attention to detail suited him ideally to the venture’s clientele. That Molly spoke Rouge, and was at least passably fluent in Violinish and Solidon, was an added piece of luck. She could translate, too, and copy critical documents.

  Nicholas accepted. In two days’ time, he and Molly were living in well-furnished rooms, purchasing their first new clothes since arriving in Grayport, and dining on wholesome food before a clean, cheerful hearth. Molly took a bath and overslept in downy blankets. Nicholas got to work, examining Kofi’s backlog of foreign correspondence and leaving Molly alone to explore the wintry city, now with money in her pocket, and discover that it wasn’t so hostile after all.

  Merchants spoke to her and smiled, sensing she could pay. The falling snow was lovelier, reminding her of warmth in their sweetly settled home, and even the taverns felt safer when she ducked inside, escaping the cold because she could, and sat before a fiddler with a cup of hot chocolate.

  But her freedom was withheld as soon as she embraced it. Nicholas began to focus on Kofi Baa’s most pressing contracts and letters, leaving Molly to translate the rest and mind the public office, a quiet brown room that faced the vibrant street. There she sat for hours, day after day. She greeted customers and accepted their paperwork and payments. Messages of particular sensitivity were handled by her brother, who made her translate and copy the most flavorless, abstruse documents to and from Rouge. How she would have liked to wander in the snow—to make a friend, climb a tower, ride a horse beyond the city!

  The doldrums only deepened once the office was established and her brother devoted himself to more delicate work in the rear parlor. Kofi Baa had benefited greatly from Nicholas’s varied expertise, and he began referring colleagues with questions about shipping regulations, tariffs, and taxes. Her brother read day and night, bolstering his knowledge, and by winter’s end, not a day was passing without several respectable businesspersons coming to Nicholas for advice or arbitration—some professional, some private, none of which he spoke about specifically with Molly.

  “A property dispute beyond the purview of the courts,” he might say, or “Familial concerns,” or “Sensitive relations.” He was something like a lawyer, or a scholar, or a minister, and those who visited the office and met him in the parlor entered nervously, or grimly, and departed much at ease.

  One night, Molly woke in the dark and sat up in bed. It was summer by then and depressingly hot. The overripe city rarely freshened with the breeze, which wafted from the west instead of from the sea so that its greatest effect was to move the smell of humid dung, sweat, and fishy remains from one stifling district to another. Molly’s window was open, and although it was late and quiet on the street, she felt that she’d been woken by an unfamiliar sound. Her senses twitched and flickered, and her heartbeat thumped, as if she’d woken from a nightmare and parts had followed her out.

  “Nicholas,” she whispered to his door across the room.

  She heard a sound downstairs: someone moving in the office.

  “Nicholas!” she said.

  The sound below her ceased. Had her voice carried down? She couldn’t leave the bed and risk creaking on the floor. Before deciding what to do, she heard the telltale hinges of the office door, so she knelt upon the bed and leaned toward the window, peeking down with only her forehead and eyes above the sill.

  She saw a man leave the office, just below her in the dark. He shut the door behind him and stood for a moment, facing south and showing the back of his head. He had black sweaty hair and too-tight breeches, and when he turned and started north, Molly knew him at once by his long, crooked nose.

  She sprang from bed and opened the door to Nicholas’s room. He wasn’t there. Molly wavered in her panic, considering first a cry of “Help!” to summon a constable or watchman but afraid, at such an hour, it would only bring the locket thief back toward the house.

  She hurried down the darkened stairs, unable to see the steps, and opened the door to the lower parlor. There were shadows on the floor from a single lit candle. For an instant every one of them was Nicholas’s body—there a foot, there his head, there a small pool of blood—and finding they were nothing only heightened Molly’s dread. He had to be in the office, where the locket thief had been. She crossed the parlor to the door, and then she braced herself and paused, hand heavy on the knob, with a great dull wedge in the middle of her chest.

  She opened the door and shrieked. Nicholas stood before her.

  He wasn’t a bit surprised and must have heard her coming, and she wondered why he hadn’t called out to reassure her.

  “What are you doing?” Molly asked, breathy and aggressive. “He was here, I saw him leave! The locket thief!”

  “Molly—”

  “Tell the truth!”

  Was it worry or a thin blade of fear in his eyes? She grabbed his arms and felt them stiffen in his loose silk sleeves. His expression did the opposite, softening within but staying hard upon the surface.

  “Don’t concern yourself,” he said.

  “Are we in danger? Did he threaten you?” she asked. “Was it him?”

  He stepped toward her as she held his arms and backed her into the parlor. He had strengthened over the summer and was harder to resist. Humidity engulfed them and the candlelight throbbed.

  “Trust me,” Nicholas said. “I have everything in hand.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  That was how she recognized the Maimer in the Orange. He was the locket thief, familiar with his long, crooked nose.

  Molly told Tom a version of the story, carefully trimmed but with enough good meat to give it substance—enough, she hoped, to sate his curiosity for now. She told him nothing of their lives back in Umber, nothing about their false identities or masquerade marriage. She called Nicholas her brother and used his real name, and she referred to Kofi Baa as “a trader from Aquaria.” It had been strange to let the story blossom in her mind again, knowing both the seed and the eventual corruption. Her surface had been cool, her insides boiling. There were questions she herself had not yet answered—pieces of her past she couldn’t fit together—and she scarcely knew which part of the truth would compromise her worst.

  In essence, Tom learned that the siblings Molly and Nicholas had arrived by ship and struggled in Grayport, had been employed by a benevolent Aquarian, and had apparently fallen foul of a street thief who would, in time, become the Maimer currently imprisoned upstairs.

  Tom leaned backward, one hand on his cup, the other on the pipe clamped in his teeth. Smoke obscured his face. The lantern hung behind him; she was lit and he was not. Molly’s mouth had gummed up, and she had already finished her drink. She didn’t remember doing so and tried to take a sip, but all she got was smoak grounds, gritty on her tongue. She craved another cup. How the flavor had relaxed her—it felt as if she’d drunk a little portion of the tavern. Oh, to be a stranger! Just an ordinary woman in the taproom with Tom, sharing smoak and conversation, free from scrutiny and doubt.

  She flipped the cup and let the grounds ooze slowly in her hand, and then she moved them with her finger, drawing symbols in her palm. Tom kept smoking. His tobacco glowed and crackled.

  Did he believe a word she’d said? Did he expect her to continue? His silence seemed to indicate that she hadn’t confessed enough, and he would sit, and wait for more, until the pipe went cold.

  * * *

  Tom smoked a while longer, trying to fill in the blanks and sift the truth of Molly’s story. She had answered what he’d asked, telling him how she knew the Maimer, and given him more of her recent past than
she had confided to anyone in Root, including Benjamin and Bess. But damned if she had told him anything of worth.

  She sat the way a water drop dangles off a spout, perfect and precarious as long as it can hold. He laid the pipe beside his cup and said, “You never learned more about the visit that night?”

  “My brother was secretive,” she said. “Even as a child.”

  “You’re sure the people he met in the parlor were respectable?”

  “No,” Molly said, glimmeringly honest.

  “Private business,” he mumbled, low enough that Molly leaned forward into his words. Tom leaned, too, and they continued up close, the way a couple might converse when they’re surrounded by a crowd. “Now and then,” he said, “backroom talk makes an enemy or two. Or maybe the thief upstairs harbored some resentment. However Nicholas got your locket back, it wasn’t by asking nicely. Once your brother had money and some upper-crust connections, he’d have made a fat target for a criminal with a grudge.”

  Molly touched the smoak grounds smeared around her palm. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “You don’t believe it, though.”

  She stared at him and sighed. “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “People didn’t take advantage of Nicholas.”

  “Everyone’s vulnerable.”

  “You didn’t know my brother.”

  “But he’s dead,” Tom said, very bluntly, to disarm her.

  Molly looked down, wiping her hand on the table with no apparent notice of the mess she was making. He took her hand in both of his own and didn’t let go when she instinctively recoiled. He smelled the warm smoak. She would taste like it, too—cinnamony and rich—and he had urges that were smudging up his line of proper thinking.

  “How did your brother die?” he asked. Her hand spiked a fever. Tom felt it up his arm, through his shoulder, to his chest. “Did the Maimer upstairs kill him?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Was he after you on purpose in the woods?”