Tom seized him by the collar and the back of his breeches, the masons held his arms, and then they all dragged him out through the kitchen into the yard. Molly held a napkin to her nose and followed Bess, who looked as if she and not her father had been bludgeoned by the fiddle.
“Get him in the stocks,” Tom said behind the tavern.
The stocks were near the garden, just beyond the door light, tall enough to make a prisoner stand but low enough to force him into a stoop. The masons got Lem positioned in the notches. Tom clapped the stocks shut and locked the boards in place. Lem’s agony and drunkenness were wearing off together and he growled, shook the padlock, and drooled into his beard.
Bess held her fist very tightly to her lips. Molly stood beside her, trying to stop her nosebleed. Half the tavern followed them out and Lem’s fury hit a crescendo. He would either break the stocks or snap his neck with so much thrashing.
Tom dropped a bucket into the well and drew it up. He was hulking when he carried it—mightier than Lem in Molly’s estimation—and formidably calm as he walked toward the stocks. Tom splashed him in the face. “Sober up and settle down,” he said.
Incredibly, it worked; Lem began to moan, sagging as his beard dribbled water in the mud. Molly’s nose had bloodied the napkin and her whole head pulsed. Mosquitoes buzzed her ears but formed a cloud around Lem, whose tannery stink and helplessness attracted them in force.
“It’s over,” Tom said, backing everybody in.
Nabby was beside herself at having so much traffic in her kitchen. She tried to shoo them out when they turned to come inside again, but instead they heeded Tom, suffered Nabby’s hexes as they tromped back through, and returned to the stifling taproom, where nobody was left to serve drinks or keep the peace.
“You all right?” Tom said to Molly.
“It’s only a nosebleed.”
He turned and asked Bess, “What about you?”
She bubbled into sobs, as full of fury as of sadness. Tom hugged her close and let her blubber on his chest.
“Take her in,” he told Molly, speaking to her gently through a fissure in his anger. “And have Benjamin look at your nose. Will you do that for me?”
Molly nodded, pried Bess away from Tom, and led her into the kitchen, where they both rinsed their faces.
“Not a week goes by you don’t bloody up my kitchen,” Nabby said, but she was quick to hand Bess a restorative cup of wine.
Tom remained outside and Lem resumed shouting. Molly guided Bess out of earshot and into the taproom, where Benjamin stood examining Lucas, who held a glass of rum with badly trembling hands. His collar was torn. Angry red marks had risen on his neck. He pursed his lips and puffed, as if to breathe were still a challenge, and his fiddle lay demolished in a pool of spilled cider.
Bess’s eyes were round and raw.
“Nothing cracked or crushed,” Benjamin told the women, studying his patient with a palliative smile.
“I’m sorry about your fiddle,” Molly said with all her heart.
Lucas stooped and gathered it up, a mess of strings and fractured maple with the scroll still intact atop the separated neck. He looked at Molly sharply, as if she had broken it for sport, and glared at Bess as if she’d grown a beard and stank of rotten hides. When he stood and carried his poor, crumpled fiddle to the door, Bess collapsed into his empty chair and cried without reserve.
Cracked and crushed, Molly thought, recalling Benjamin’s words, and cursed the spineless fiddler for abandoning her friend.
Sheriff Pitt strode in—scarlet-vested, flush with pomp—just as Lucas slouched out.
“What the deuce happened now?”
* * *
Tom breathed a gnat and bottled up a cough. The heavy dark air was full of barn musk and plant steam, and between the background chatter of the tavern and Lem’s protestations, a pressurized quiet filled Tom’s mind, thoughtless and profound, until he felt he’d either explode or stay that way forever. Then Pitt showed up.
“I see you treat your kin contemptuously, too,” the sheriff said.
Pitt crossed the yard halfway to Lem, who gentled down quickly in the presence of the law.
“He walked in fighting,” Tom said.
“He’s peaceable now.”
“That’s because he’s in the goddamned stocks.”
Pitt grinned. It broadened his cheeks and made his head look thicker. “I’m surprised you managed to hold him,” he said, “instead of shooting him in the back and letting him float to kingdom come.”
He plucked the key from Tom’s hand and unlocked the stocks.
Lem stepped away, slipping in his crapulence and landing in the mud. He wiped mosquitoes off his face, smearing himself with filth, and looked a perfect drunken wreck when he tottered to his feet. For a second his contrition seemed entirely sincere, and in his sweetness and distress he briefly resembled his sister. Tom felt the pang, remembering his mother, but he wouldn’t bow to gold-leaf memories tonight.
“Tell me what happened,” Pitt said.
“I was being a concerned father, is all,” Lem said, beady-eyed, sounding as if he’d memorized the words. “I come to the tavern and that fiddler boy is groping up my Bessie. ’Fore I know it, he attacks me.”
“Was that the way of it, Tom?”
“Not ruddy likely. I didn’t see the start of it,” he had to admit. “Benjamin called me in and Lem was hitting Molly.”
Pitt turned to fetch the doctor but he had already appeared, having patiently observed the situation from the kitchen. He lent an air of reason with his scholar-prim demeanor. Pitt looked relieved to see him at the door.
“I was summoning Tom from the stables,” Benjamin said, “and missed the first spark. I will attest that Lem arrived in high intoxication. Young Lucas had been seized about the neck and might have suffered worse—asphyxia, for instance, or compression of the larynx—if not for Molly and Tom’s intervention. Fourscore witnesses will verify the facts.”
“I only come to see my daughter,” Lem muttered with deflation. If Tom had closed his eyes to visualize the speaker, he might have imagined a well-mannered giant, ignorant but dignified, standing hat in hand with guileless intent. “I don’t see her no more, now that Tom has stole her off.”
“She ain’t a branded heifer,” Tom said. “She’s here of her own accord.”
He stood with Lem and Pitt, close enough to punch. Another squall was bearing down, invisible in the dark but sounding like wind with the rainfall rushing through the trees across the river. Pitt inhaled dramatically, averting his nose so as not to smell Lemuel directly.
“Go inside,” he said to Benjamin, who left without a word, and then it was just the three of them and Tom was on his own. “Bess is old enough to choose,” Pitt said to Lem. “And let’s not pretend you haven’t caused trouble before.”
Every now and then, the son of a bitch showed common sense.
But then he said to Tom, “That doesn’t make her being here seemly. This isn’t the first complaint I’ve had about your boarders.”
“Is that right.”
“Two young women living under your roof,” Pitt continued. “Folks would like to know the genuine thrust of the arrangement.”
“Folks,” Tom said. “Is this a formal complaint or just talk?”
“Call it a friendly warning.” The lanterns in the kitchen lit the side of Pitt’s head, showing half his face and leaving the other half eclipsed. “Get your house in order before it becomes a question of considering your license. I’m meeting with the governor next month and it’s my duty to mention any municipal concerns that need addressing.”
“Since when is hiring women a municipal concern?” Tom asked, backing Pitt up toward a shadowy pile of manure.
“I’ll make a list of incidents and nail it to your door,” Pitt said, presumably in jest. “You know I’ll have to speak about the prisoner who escaped.”
There had been three more attacks in the intervening weeks, and c
omments had been made, rarely to Tom’s face, that his failure to keep the Maimer secure had cost the town a vital advantage. Throughout the exchange, Lem had done his best to keep himself steady, but he suddenly lost his balance and stumbled into Pitt, who managed to prop him up but trampled the manure.
“You’re made for each other,” Tom said without amusement.
Pitt scowled at Lem and said, “Go home and sober up.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll reimburse me for the mess you caused tonight,” Tom said to his uncle.
“Not until you reimburse me for my Bessie,” Lem said.
“I’ll let her know you’re willing to barter. You can leave from out here. I don’t want you tracking filth through the tavern. You, too,” he said to Pitt, who only now looked down and saw what he was standing in.
Pitt nodded at his shoes as if this, exactly this, was what he expected from the Orange, and Tom himself couldn’t help regarding his property as a place where, yes, shit like this and people like his uncle were bound to appear.
Lem clomped away; drunk or not, it was the only way the man ever walked. Pitt wiped his feet in the grass, rather too close to the door, and left Tom alone as rain began to fall, drenching and warm and somehow stagnant in the dark.
Folks, Tom thought, recalling Pitt’s word.
It was Abigail still, slipping thoughts in people’s heads. She had publicly supported Bess’s moving in, but for Tom to harbor Molly was something else entirely, despite the fact that she herself and Benjamin had done so. She had questioned every traveler she met throughout the summer, pointing Molly out whenever she could and mentioning “the dead brother,” never suspecting that Tom knew more than he admitted and was already making his own quiet inquiries to travelers.
The rain stopped as briskly as it had come. Instead of freshening him up, it had spattered mud on his stockings and left him with the steaming, clingy weight of sodden clothes. The tavern stood before him, its stone foundation muddied like his legs, its clapboards deeply weathered by a thousand other rainfalls. To the right of where he stood, the storeroom and secondary bedrooms—an addition to the original building, one that predated even his parents’ ownership of the tavern—made an L-shaped enclosure in a portion of the yard. It was cozy and secluded, and it recalled him to his childhood and other rainy nights when he used to help his father with the horses in the stables.
So many memories of his father had an element of dark: a reassuring figure in the brightness of a door, a shadow in the barn, a body on the floor. After carrying the straw and mucking out the stalls, Tom would run toward the lantern in the kitchen—this very kitchen, with the very same lantern—and forget to take his shoes off. He remembered how his mother’s laugh lines sagged in disappointment when she turned to find him sullying her newly swept floor, and how she met him in the light, and lectured him again, but handed him a fresh-baked cracknell all the same.
He tasted caraway seeds and smelled the flour on her apron. This was home and there was more to it than licenses and sentiment. His father had died for it and his brother had abandoned it, but his mother had lived for the Orange and given it to Tom, and neither governor nor grief would take it from his hands.
Chapter Twenty
Later that night, after everyone had gone, Molly found Tom alone in the taproom. He sat at a table near the window and watched a shower of rain. A lone, stumpy candle in the middle of the room was scarcely bright enough to qualify as illumination, and the saturated heat was like the air beneath a blanket.
“How’s Bess?” he asked.
“Sleeping,” Molly said.
So were Ichabod and Nabby and the handful of travelers. She flapped the front of her gown to ventilate her breasts and grazed her left nipple. That was all it took to overwhelm her senses and she wobbled off center, like a pudding set aquiver. It astonished her to be so affected. After last winter, she’d believed the urge had died but here it was, resurrected like an everlasting body.
Molly stood beside Tom with her belly near his ear. She reached toward his tied-back hair without his noticing.
“Why was she talking to Lucas?” he asked.
“She’s been saving her money for fiddle lessons.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I’m teasing you,” she said, and then she did grab his ponytail, squeezing it and giving it the gentlest of tugs. “She fancies him.”
“I didn’t know that, either,” Tom said without turning.
Molly released his hair, disappointed that her boldness hadn’t prompted a reaction.
“I reckon Lem scared him off,” Tom said.
“Then he wasn’t much of a man.”
“Most men have the sense to keep clear of a woman with that much trouble clinging to her skirts.”
“Not you.”
“It’s one of my reckless virtues,” Tom said, looking up at her with nothing like virtue in his eyes, as if her skirts, then and there, were smoldering off her body. Molly drew a chair and sat beside him, knee to thigh.
“What will you do about Bess and Lem?”
Tom sighed. “There isn’t much I can do. I won’t send her off, but neither will I fight him outright unless I have to. They’re all the family I got, at least around here.”
“Your brother at sea—”
“Winward,” Tom said, smiling just to say it. “People call him Win. He was smart enough to leave and not look back.”
“Don’t you love Root?”
“I do. I love the Orange. There’s a history to home, but every history has hurts. Ever seen the gash on the outside door?”
Molly nodded. She had probed it with her finger only last week.
“That’s a hatchet cut,” he said. “I could show you seven bullet holes peppering the walls. Bloodstains from accidents and childbirth and fights. A quarter of the tavern caught fire one year. You can still see the burns on the underlying frame.”
She knew the scorched wood, a few of the bullet holes, and many of the stains, some of which she’d made with her own spilled blood. She knew the black glove nailed to the parlor wall and the sinister face lurking in the hearth stones. She also knew the exact number of wishbones hanging in the taproom, the hidden panel in the upstairs hall, and the cobwebbed passage that led to the secret part of the cellar. She didn’t know most of the stories behind the details, and considering how often she discovered something new—a roughly carved symbol, or the window outside that didn’t correspond to any known room—it seemed the Orange had the history of many homes combined.
Tom fell as silent as the furniture around them.
“How did your parents die?” she asked.
“You don’t know this yet?”
There were countless questions Molly had withheld throughout the summer, especially those related to her regular companions. She knew nothing about Ichabod’s muteness, little of Benjamin and Abigail’s past, and almost none of Tom’s life aside from what she saw directly. Having secrets of her own made her hesitant to ask.
“You know about the war,” Tom said.
Molly nodded. She knew it verse and chorus from the papers back in Umber, when she used to study the articles for news about her father.
Tom looked out the window instead of at her, giving an oddly distant feel to everything he told her.
“I served for three years in the army and wound up at Fort Pine,” he said. “That’s fifty leagues north of here, mostly wilderness except for the odd settlement or two. The Rouge had found a passage from the sea to the northern Antler. They meant to run ships from the mountains to the Arrowhead River, straight down to Grayport—it would have won the war. We were a skeleton division holding Fort Pine, barely enough to man the cannons. Our captain had died of knotgut, our food and ammunition were low, and the Kraw had hemmed us in so we couldn’t send for reinforcements. We knew the Rouge were coming, and we knew General Bell and his men were only a two-day march to the west, completely unaware—”
Molly bumped his leg, r
ising from her chair. She had mostly held her breath since he mentioned Fort Pine, but on hearing her father’s name, she walked toward the bar to gather her composure.
“What?” Tom asked.
“I thought you’d like a drink,” she said, thankful of the dark.
Of course the bar was locked. She walked back to get his key and he was sitting there, perplexed, seeming worried he had rambled and annoyed that she was up.
“I want to hear it all and mean to settle in,” she said.
Molly took the key and unlocked the bar. Tom waited, silhouetted by a quick flash of lightning while she poured them each a rum, drank her own, and poured again. The heat felt thicker at the level of her head. She took the glasses back and sat. Her legs were made of wax.
“You needed reinforcements but the Kraw had hemmed you in,” she said. “What are they like?”
“The Kraw?” he asked, holding his rum and leaning away from her exaggerated interest. “Hard,” he said. “Sharp. Like a thicket made of knives. The warriors are women.”
“People say they aren’t human.”
“They’re human,” Tom said. “I admit to having wondered. The Elkinaki say the Kraw are so connected to the forest, they sicken when they leave it, like uprooted trees.”
Tom took a drink and swished before he swallowed.
“They were all around the fort, and fearsome good at hiding. A man could try to run and get a message through to Bell, but even with sharpshooters clearing the way, it was more than likely suicide. A week before the siege, I’d gotten word my mother had died of fever. My father was already dead, and there had been rumors that my brother’s ship had sunk at Point Dureef. I suppose I fell victim to despair,” Tom said. “But it felt like rage. I hated the Rouge for starting the war. I hated the Kraw for pinning us in. I hated General Bell for camping so close and not knowing how desperate we had gotten at the fort. I put it all on him. I wanted him to know.
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