Tom approached her with a huff, lungs full of steam.
“You shot a cannon to distract me? Did you truly think I’d risk—I ain’t a clod of any fashion. You might have tried dissuading me.”
“I did.” Molly frowned. “You said you’d throw me in the river.”
Tom made fists until the boil in him cooled, and then he sat on the bed and slouched with Molly standing over him. The twilit blue coming from the window showed him half of her: a hip, the subtle veins along her wrist. He focused on her waist, imagining it full. He knew she’d given birth since Benjamin had told him, yet the news that she was married curdled in his stomach.
“Pitt’s riding out to find the man who knew your husband.”
The statement cut her legs. She sat beside him, slumping forward. For a moment he believed she would vomit on the floor.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Then tell me everything,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My name is Molly Bell,” she said. “I’m General Bell’s daughter.”
Tom was on her right, their legs a ways apart but inching closer as the mattress sagged. She’d chosen to sit on the side of the bed nearer to the window and could just discern his features as she watched him at an angle, keeping her own expression shadowed and her panic in the dark.
She tried to read his mind: The man I shared a drink with. Impossible. A lie. She might have told him she was royalty or born of noble wolves. He widened his eyes and leaned away, squinted, and examined her. His disbelief shifted to a dumbfounded awe and she was trapped again, compelled by his acceptance to continue.
Unable to start at the end, the part she feared to tell, she started with her birth and how the bleeding killed her mother, speaking to the floor and painfully constricted. Tom didn’t talk. He didn’t once interrupt. She sensed his thoughts reconfiguring with every new fact, his inner ears spiraling with every new turn.
She told of her childhood in Umber, and of Nicholas and Frances, till the loneliness the memories enkindled made her falter. How her father went to war and left them in the care of Mrs. Wickware and Jeremy; how they suffered and rebelled; how their father came home and threatened to divide them; how they fled amid the riot and escaped aboard the Cleaver. Tom gestured more than once because her voice kept rising. She tried to quiet down but her spirit wouldn’t let her, and her words bubbled out, strong and effervescent. She told him the false names they adopted for the journey. She described Mr. Fen’s molestations in the cot and how he vanished in the storm with the purse full of money.
Tom was already conversant with their early days in Grayport. She paused to let him play it through his memory again, now with Nicholas and Molly in their artificial marriage. They had met Kofi Baa and settled in the city, Molly translating, Nicholas doing business in the parlor, and the locket thief had visited her brother in the night.
It was here the truth began and where the crux of it was hidden. Molly took a breath that seemed to go forever, as if her body were a chasm with the world falling in.
* * *
Day upon day, for much of the spring and far too much of early summer, Molly sat with quill and paper in the quiet brown room while interesting strangers—men and women, young and old, most of obvious affluence—passed by her desk to meet her brother in the back.
“They require anonymity,” Nicholas told her more than once.
She spoke with them as long as they would allow. Some ignored her. Others humored her—Mr. Bole was always voluble and happy to converse—but she was never able to glean the nature of their visits.
Nicholas’s health was enviably strong, as if his work were not depleting him but curing him of weakness. It was Molly who was pale and tired in the mornings. She was cramped and inky-fingered, scratching out letters, and although she counted her blessings after such a frightful winter, there came a point when gratitude was not enough to sate her. Nothing seemed as gorgeous as the street beyond the window or as vivid as a sun-kissed stranger passing by.
Molly longed to socialize but Nicholas forbade it.
“Father may have sent men from Umber to discover us,” he said. “We must confine ourselves to necessary interactions.”
“Why did we escape, if not to live however we choose?”
“It’s only for a time,” Nicholas assured her.
Weeks passed. Months. Nicholas grew cagier than ever about his dealings, instructing Molly to avoid not only conversation with his visitors but eye contact, too; and indeed, many who came to the office looked embarrassed to have come. A lady might pass several times before opening the door. A gentleman would fumble with his hat or stammer words. Regulars ignored her altogether when they entered; Molly might have been a candlestick for all that they acknowledged her. Sometimes, irked, she greeted them effusively, asking the leeriest visitors direct questions about their business and commenting on the wigs, hats, cloaks, and eyeglasses she believed were intended as disguises.
Nicholas knew better than to punish or berate her—Molly had balked at his suggestion that she work in a more isolated room—but the clash of wills approached a dangerous strain, until the tension was relieved, at least in part, by a stranger.
“A man named John Summer is coming today,” Nicholas told Molly one morning in July. “He is a protégé of Kofi Baa, newly arrived from Aquaria and unfamiliar with Grayport. Mr. Baa is traveling abroad for several months and has asked me to escort Mr. Summer around the city as he establishes his contacts. As I have matters of urgency that cannot be disrupted—”
“Yes,” Molly said before he finished the request.
It wasn’t quite the unchecked liberty she craved, but she would rather walk the breadth of Grayport with a wearisome companion than spend another day cloistered in the office.
Cheerless. Middle-aged. Dull as old snuff. Molly had limned Mr. Summer long before he came, and so when a different sort of man arrived midmorning, she experienced a tingling rush of blood, strong as rum, in regions of her body not commonly awakened. He was Nicholas’s age, slightly older than herself, elegantly thin but vital in his movements. His shirt and waistcoat were new and fashionably rumpled. He wore his hair cropped short, like many from his country, and his skin appeared especially dark in contrast with the day-lit doorway at his back. He opened both hands and showed his upturned palms, the Aquarian way of saying “Please accept me; I accept you.”
Molly said hello and returned the Aquarian gesture. Nicholas shook his hand and introduced himself as Jacob, and then they stood and spoke of travel and shipping contacts while Molly kept aside, watching John Summer and studying his face. His mouth seemed naturally inclined toward a smile but he listened to her brother with intense concentration—a gravity at odds with his carefree pose. He smelled of juniper and leather, with a dash of open sea.
Her brother was brief. His loyalty to Kofi Baa extended to this protégé, but Molly sensed impatience, perhaps even competitiveness, in Nicholas’s demeanor, and after the necessary pleasantries he wished John Summer success with his visit and retired to the parlor, leaving Molly and their guest to navigate the city.
It was a hot, brilliant day. The streets were dry as baked fish, and people’s faces looked salted more than sweaty in the sun. They walked a few blocks with little conversation, acclimating slowly to the energy around them—businesspeople, shopkeepers, artisans, and traders constantly in motion, stirring dust around the cobblestones.
“‘John Summer’ doesn’t sound Aquarian,” she said.
He laughed with wary eyes, then sighed without a smile. “I am an orphan. I chose my own name.”
Molly thought of when her brother chose “Smith” before the Cleaver. She had fought to keep her name; she was Molly through and through.
“What happened to your family?”
“Gone,” John said.
She couldn’t bring herself to ask whether they were dead or only missing. As they walked from the fruit market to the harbor, he asked about he
r life and Molly told him, with unconcealed boredom, the well-rehearsed story she and Nicholas had devised. John Summer listened casually but studied her face with ardor; she supposed that, sensing the lie, he trained his interest on the liar.
He was far more engaged when she described how she and her “husband” had met Kofi Baa. He told her his own story of benefaction: a parentless child in Aquaria, he had stowed away on a merchant ship bound for Bruntland and been captured. Instead of being punished when he was brought before Kofi, he was promptly made cabin boy and nurtured on the sea.
“I have been everywhere from Swiftland to Crescencia.”
“But you need a guide in Grayport?”
“The city changes every year.” John paused to view the harbor they had only just reached, and which appeared more colorful and packed with splendid sails than Molly herself remembered. The season of travel and trade was fully under way, and it seemed that for every person who left for other ports, two more arrived to seek their fortune on the continent—a perpetually new world attracting young, intrepid hopefuls from Solido, Brach, Bruntland, Violinia, and Rouge. They were streaming in now from the harbor to the city with their unfamiliar faces and their unbridled dreams.
John Summer looked as lost—though not as daunted and forlorn—as she and Nicholas had been on the day they disembarked. Molly felt the sunlight washing through her limbs. She looked at John and tried imagining the flavor of his skin, as she would do upon discovering a rare, foreign fruit.
He smiled at the sky, as if he’d noticed her attention. “The world is like a heart full of unknown loves. It is vigorous and strange. A wonder to explore.”
“But dangerous.”
“Of course,” he said, squinting at the sun. “A great adventure. Before I left Aquaria, the world was flat and empty. Then I went to sea and felt the roundness all about me. What if you had lived and died without seeing Floria?”
Or withered in an office, translating Rouge. “Will you stay here long, or sail around the world again?”
He looked at her with sparkles of enticement in his eyes.
“I am traveling north to Kinship in two weeks’ time,” he said, “facilitating river shipments of merryweather tea for Mr. Baa. Have you tasted merryweather tea?”
“No,” Molly said.
“Then you must.” He took her hand and led her off toward a coffeehouse, moistening her palm. “It is a cup of many seasons.”
So it was, and so was he: a taste of many seasons. So she told herself at night and over a week of daily walks, discovering the city with the spark of an explorer. John Summer was a gentleman—a toying, cavalier, insinuating gentleman—and although he met with numerous importers and river captains to arrange the northern delivery of merryweather tea, he was inclined to roam the streets entirely for pleasure. He and Molly walked to popular landmarks, lunched at various public houses, and followed the whims of curiosity and mood.
They dined on berry-smothered fowl and spoke of the Glacial Islands, which he told her were inhabited by turtles shelled with ice. They shared wine and soup of lamb’s head at the Purple Lion, where Molly enjoyed the deference her Aquarian friend commanded. People glanced at them and nodded, seeing luxury not only from his spending, which was loose, but from their free-floating laughter and the halo of their ease. They visited the marketplace for popping-wet kumquats, sugary bananas, and phosphorescent pears. She talked about the waterbreath and bird crabs at sea. John knew both and relished her descriptions, seeming to doubt—with great amusement—her account of scaling the masts.
“Are you such a dauntless climber?”
“All my life,” Molly said.
“I quail at any height. Sailors often taunt me.”
She led him through the city to the church on Beacon Mount. The building stood alone on the outskirts of Grayport, white and salty gray upon a soft green hill. It was slender, long and plain with green-tinted windows and a fifty-foot steeple with a brass Star of Lumen. They went inside and Molly pulled him up the stairs toward the belfry, John cowering in a hunch but smiling, always smiling, with his slightly gapped teeth and round-hearted verve. The steeple seemed a good deal higher than it was, rising as it did upon the isolated hill with hay carts below, and a tiny fenced graveyard, and horses that appeared as small as dogs from such a height. Behind them spread the vast frontier’s rolling trees, in front of them the city and the harbor and the sea. Molly leaned backward with her spine against the rail. The peak above the belfry rose another ten feet.
“I could climb and reach the star,” she said, gazing up and swaying as the clouds moved beyond it.
John knelt, afraid to stand, and pulled her in toward the bell.
“I will have my revenge,” he said. “What are you afraid of?”
“Restriction,” Molly said.
He held her wrists and wouldn’t release them. “You must say the secret word.”
“What is it?” Molly asked.
“I cannot say.”
“I cannot speak it, then.”
She watched him as he knelt. His hands were tight as manacles. He couldn’t bear the view and stared at her instead, looking up past her bosom to her face with concentration—playful brutishness, it seemed, or guarded desperation.
“Come now. Guess.”
“No,” Molly said.
“I won’t let you go.”
“Then we’ll stay until the moonrise.”
Wind snapped his sleeves and emphasized the height.
“I must devise another way to hold you,” John said, releasing her and creeping down the stairs as Molly laughed at him. She rubbed her wrists and briefly grew dizzy from the height.
* * *
“Are you showing him the city or the boundaries of the continent?” Nicholas asked irritably one evening, having spent the afternoon on her neglected translations.
“He is hopeless,” Molly said. “It’s miraculous he finds his way here every morning.”
“A wonder Kofi Baa thinks so highly of him.”
“You needn’t be jealous.”
“I am nothing of the sort,” Nicholas told her. “But I cannot spare you much longer from your work. Shall I remind you how desperate we had become before our current situation?”
“We couldn’t afford a spoon without Kofi’s help. I should think whatever he asks of us, however inconvenient—”
“Yes, of course,” Nicholas said with dubious conviction.
“He needs me one more day”—Needs, Molly thought—“and then he travels north to Kinship, eighty leagues away.”
“I know where Kinship is.”
On a map, out of reach. She saw the papers on her desk, a fortnight’s worth of unfinished work: contracts, lists of regulations, correspondence. Translating, copying, interpreting, repeating. Nicholas’s quill scratched itself dry. She felt the splitting of the nib, the speckling ink, the crinkling sheets—how flat and parched the future map of summer would become.
John had no additional business prior to his trip, and he and Molly spent the following day on a long, desultory amble through the city. The midmorning sun was painfully direct. Molly’s neck began to burn. John was heavy and subdued. They came to a tavern called Pike’s Salty Herring, crammed between houses and, with its dingy dark nooks and solitary drinkers, seeming cooler than the summer-bright street. Molly took a booth while John walked through to use the privy out back. She ordered a cider from the keep, a porcine man who rubbed his meaty knuckles.
“What’ll your husband want?” he asked.
Molly flushed and said, “The same.”
She sat in the booth, snugly shadowed, and watched as John returned and stopped to order at the bar.
“Your wife has beat you to it,” said the keep. “Be just a moment.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Summer,” John said when he rejoined her.
The dark was not enough to hide her from his stare, nor cool enough to moderate the swelter in her clothes. Her toes were wriggly moist deep inside her sho
es and Molly smelled herself, slippery and sweet as buttered onions.
They talked for nearly an hour till the cider fizzed her head, and then they left and walked the sultry half mile to his inn. Molly clasped his arm and told him she was faint. It wasn’t a ruse. Colors shifted and her vision turned sparkly. John held her close but his voice seemed distant. The distortions didn’t pass until he took her inside, sat her in a chair, and fanned her with a newspaper. The owner of the inn brought her rum and water. He offered to summon a doctor.
“No,” Molly said. “It’s nothing. Too much sun.”
The drink revived her enough to stand. They thanked the owner for his care and John led her upstairs so she could rest, close her eyes, and thoroughly recover. It was a tiny room, softly green with ivy-patterned walls. There was a bed, a desk, and two packed trunks beneath a window.
John closed the door. She clapped her hands around his cheeks and kissed him on the mouth, clinging to his body like a warm wet leaf. He pushed her off but held her arms, rebuffing her but keeping her, his grimace so intense she might have called it murderous if not for how his eyelids flickered in alarm.
“He isn’t my husband. He’s my brother,” Molly said. “His name is Nicholas.”
It felt as if a sea breeze billowed through her ribs. She’d rarely talked of Nicholas, and John had rarely asked. He must have been suspicious but to say it out loud, in the light and with his cider-sweet flavor on her lips, felt as brash and oddly natural as taking off her clothes. His jaw hung agape. Then it closed. Then it flexed. He inhaled through his nose as if her voice were a fragrance and he wasn’t yet sure if it was poisonous or clean.
He pulled her in slowly, dropped her arms, and caught her waist. Molly held his head again, thumbs behind his ears, and kissed him so deeply that he hummed through her tongue. She leaned away and gasped, surprised and out of air. It wasn’t as she’d imagined it would be but rather slipperier, and messier, and firmer, and a great deal softer.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you since we met.”
“I know,” John said. “I thought of stealing you away.”
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