Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  He held her hands and finished with a sentimental sigh but the words felt old, like the fragment of tooth in her locket—something from the past that didn’t link them anymore.

  “But we haven’t been together,” Molly said, dead cold. “You’ve told me what to do and held me at a distance, ignoring all my questions and denying me a voice. Were you really so astonished when I finally defied you?”

  “Precisely,” Nicholas said. “Our disunity has hurt us. Now I wish to start again, repairing what is broken.”

  Molly shook her head.

  He pleaded with his eyes. “We’ll find the child a home. A loving family.”

  “No.”

  “We must.”

  “We won’t be parted,” Molly said, pulling away to hold her womb and showing him the meaning of the newborn we.

  * * *

  Their relations in the final weeks were taciturn and hostile, an intolerable situation in the snowbound cabin. She knew her labor was approaching—the baby had dropped extraordinarily low—and had asked her brother more than once to fetch a doctor. The way to Kinship had started to clear in a rush of warmer air, which had melted much of the snow and turned the nearby creek into a torrent, and although the muddy forest would be perilous for Molly, Nicholas could surely brave the trail to summon help.

  He refused with little explanation, maybe fearing she would flee to save her baby once he left, or maybe intending—more cruelly than she had ever thought possible—to use her desperation as a final form of leverage.

  “You would endanger me and the baby?”

  “I wouldn’t risk your safety on the trail,” Nicholas said, “or leave you here alone in such a delicate condition. If the route becomes reliable, we may attempt to travel.”

  “And if not?” Molly asked.

  “I prepared for all contingencies.”

  “How?”

  “I read a book,” he said.

  We should have kept a horse, she thought, or left the cabin sooner. Where was Edgar with his sledge? Why had Nicholas insisted on a place so remote? Was he really so prepared, and was she willing to believe it? I will help if you surrender, his demeanor seemed to say, and then I will think of a solution. Otherwise, we stay. But Molly would sooner give birth alone than sacrifice her baby, so they waited, far from aid, each hoping that the other would eventually relent.

  Her nights felt surrounded by a wide, cold void. She would wake from fitful sleep, convinced the baby had died, and lie in mounting panic till the child moved within her. Nature seemed a threat: the downpouring rain, branches cracking in the wind. The creek filled the gorge; Nicholas checked it hourly to monitor the swell, fearing it would inundate the clearing and the cabin.

  Molly was unprepared for labor but refused to ask questions, hoping to appear less helpless than she was. The act had killed her mother with an outpour of blood. She knew that many infants died—she herself, Frances had told her, had almost been strangled by the cord—and even if the two of them survived, what then?

  The following week, her water broke. At first she thought it was urine. She was about to change her clothing in the cabin’s private room when a powerful contraction made her brace against the wall. A cramp seized her back. She stooped but didn’t sit. It was morning, but her bedroom didn’t have a window and she turned toward the doorway, looking for the light.

  “Nicholas,” she said.

  He walked to her at once, spotless in a boiled white shirt and black breeches, looking doctorly and sharp, prepared to see it through. When the contraction passed, he laid out her sleeping gown and left her in the room, allowing her to change before returning with a candle and a clasped leather bag.

  “That hurt,” Molly said. “Does it get much worse?”

  “Yes. Don’t be scared.”

  He opened the bag and arranged forceps, medical shears, and several unfamiliar instruments on a small table at the foot of the bed.

  “Did you really read a book?”

  “Twice,” Nicholas said.

  “Nnn,” she said, moaning from a second, worse contraction. She lay across the bed, head dangling off the side, while the muscles in her back and lower belly twisted fiercely.

  “Another so soon?” he asked. “Impetuous as ever.”

  The ceiling blurred and bowed until the tightening relaxed. Nicholas had a mortar and a pair of tiny bottles. He measured seven drops of blue and five of crimson into a glass of boiling water, set the violet mixture to the side, and pulverized a shriveled gray leaf with a pestle. To this he added a pinch of white powder from an envelope, stirred it into the water, and strained the finished liquid into a cup.

  “What is it?” Molly asked, slowly sitting up.

  “For the pain,” Nicholas said and placed it in her hands.

  The smell alone was soothing, like the first air of spring. It wasn’t the first concoction he had given her over the years and yet she hesitated, looking at his face—the fine black whiskers on his jaw, his blank expression—so intensely that he seemed both familiar and unknown. Steam wet her chin. Rain beat the roof.

  “It stormed when I was born,” she said.

  “I won’t let you die.”

  “How can you be so comforting and frightening together?”

  “Love,” Nicholas said.

  She trusted him and drank. He took the cup when she was finished, held her hand, and smiled sadly. Molly listened to the rain until the sound of it engulfed her.

  * * *

  What did she remember of the delirium that followed? Nicholas’s potion didn’t quell the pain. It divided her in halves, one feeling, one observing, neither part entirely in tune with what was happening. She spoke to him and cried but she didn’t hear the sound. At other times her voice seemed to echo in the cabin and she wondered who had spoken, wondered who had screamed. Her contractions deepened and quickened, the ebb and flow rising to a long, full tide, as constant as a weight bearing down upon her. Then the weight swelled out instead of pressing in.

  The room fell dark. She saw a lantern overhead, or maybe she was sideways and looking at a table. Nicholas was near; Nicholas was gone. For a while she herself disappeared, mind and body, and she only felt the baby growing larger on the bed. It seemed as if her navel had been tugged through her back and she was inside out with the child all around her. Then a vision of her knees, raised and parted far below, and Nicholas’s face in the gap between her thighs. She had the horrible impression she was giving birth to him until her eyes dropped back and rolled around the dark.

  She slept when it was over, paralyzed and cold. Under the rumble in her heart was the rumble of the creek. She was certain that the cabin had been taken by the flood. Molly felt the bed sway quietly beneath her and her body felt buoyant, hollow as a bubble. Deeper than the water and her thoughts, there was loss. It made her want to sink and let it swallow her forever.

  * * *

  Molly woke in bed. The night was soft and windless. Her sleeping gown and blanket smelled fresh—newly aired—and an inkling of moonlight clarified her door. All that made sound was the creek beyond the clearing, brooding and continuous and felt as much as heard. Warmer air beyond the room brought a fragrance of renewal: vegetation, healthy mud. She was sore through her bones but her body felt smooth.

  She couldn’t tell how many days and nights had passed, how many memories were genuine or totally imagined. When she moved her hands instinctively to feel her round belly, it was as flat as if her whole lower half had been removed.

  Worse. She was empty. She was boundlessly alone. She jolted up with sickening ease and pulled her gown above her hips, examining her waist, where the skin felt loose and her navel had retreated. Her breasts remained swollen and were leaking through her gown. Her baby wasn’t there, in the room or in the cabin. She could feel the loss as surely as she felt it in her body.

  Molly slid her feet off the corner of the bed. The floor was colder than the air, still chilled by the winter-long shade beneath the boards. She to
ok her time getting up and gathering her balance. It was odd to see the room from an ordinary height. She had lost so much weight, such a terrible amount, she moved as if afloat into the cabin’s central room.

  A fire burned low, mostly embers left aflutter. Their belongings were arranged in crates and bags along the wall. Nicholas’s table had been moved beside the window. On its surface lay a quill, sheets of paper, and a gun.

  It was the pistol she and Nicholas had brought when they escaped. No ammunition bag or powder, only the ramrod beside it. The moon drew a thin, glinting line along the barrel.

  When she went to the table and looked out the window, Nicholas was standing at the edge of the clearing. He was fifty yards away with his back toward the cabin, gazing at the gorge where the creek was so high that it surrounded him with puffs of illuminated mist.

  Maybe the gun was empty. Molly picked it up. She fit the ramrod inside, just as Nicholas had taught her, and determined that the gun was loaded with a ball. She twisted in and listened for the faint grind of powder, put the ramrod down, and took the pistol outside.

  Nicholas wore a white silk shirt and black waistcoat. He didn’t move as Molly approached, though he must have heard the suction of her steps in the mud. Gray-green pines ringed the borders of the clearing with the cabin far behind her and the torrent dead ahead. Grass had yet to grow but there was sodden, bubbling moss. The night felt luxuriously warm through her gown, at least until the creek mist wafted up around her. It had wet her brother’s hair and now it wet her face. She stopped and stood behind him, terribly awake.

  “You had a daughter,” Nicholas said.

  He turned and looked calmly at the muzzle of the gun. His skin was pearly in the moonlight. It lent his face the beauty of a nocturnal flower, one designed for poisoning whatever it could lure.

  “My baby—”

  “You were hemorrhaging,” he said. “You don’t remember.”

  Molly gripped the gun to fight the tremor in her hand.

  “I kept you both alive,” he said. “You held her and you nursed her.”

  “No.”

  “You called her Cora.”

  She had considered the name for weeks but Nicholas hadn’t known. It must be true, Molly thought—he must have heard her speak it—but she had no memory of looking at her daughter. Was it possible she’d held her and entirely forgotten?

  “Where—”

  “I did my utmost.” He pivoted his heel and scrutinized her face. “A doctor would have been as powerless to help.”

  Molly kept her distance, stepping sideways as Nicholas moved around her in a circle, and reversed their two positions till the creek was at her back. She raised the gun deliberately and aimed through her tears.

  “Nature may be swayed or briefly hindered,” Nicholas said. “In the end it has its way, resolute as God.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Molly.”

  “What did you do?”

  Nicholas moved toward her. She retreated with surprise in the cool slick mud until her feet reached the limit of the ground beside the gorge. Vapor swirled around her from the water just below.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  Nicholas answered but she couldn’t hear the word.

  “Where’s my baby?” Molly yelled.

  “Gone,” he said again.

  The roar filled her ears, the spray obscured the cabin, and the trees on either side made the clearing like a chasm. She was plunging in the dark. Dark plunged within her. Nicholas continued moving closer to the gun.

  “You planned it,” Molly said. “You forged the letter and you trapped me here. What did you do to John?”

  “Molly, stop.”

  “You killed my baby.”

  “Don’t move,” Nicholas said.

  He slowly reached toward her and she fully cocked the gun. For a moment, Molly wondered if her thoughts were mere delirium, if everything he’d told her of his efforts, and her bleeding, and the baby at her breast was the truth and not a lie. But the pistol and the bullet couldn’t be denied.

  “Was this for me?” she asked. “You’d take me back to Grayport or shoot me?”

  “Molly, please. Don’t—”

  She fired.

  Through the billow, as the kickback knocked her off the edge, she saw the bullet make a ripple in his shirt, near his heart. He was dead before his face ever registered the shot.

  Molly fell and hit the water. Night exploded in the splash. She swatted at the surface but the creek rolled her under and the noise, the sound of everything alive, disappeared. Cold crushed her, and her skin shrank tight around her bones.

  She didn’t know if she was sinking. She was moving. She was gone. She didn’t try to breathe but let the agony embrace her. Dizzy and alone, she waited for the end.

  Cora, Molly thought, seeing colors in the dark.

  The colors terrified her, causing her to kick and try to swim. The water dipped and corkscrewed, twisting up her gown. She did her best to right herself and fought the urge to gasp until at last she cleared the surface, coughing but alive. The air sent vivifying tingles through her veins, but she was tired and the cold drained the spirit from her arms. The current was increasing as it barreled down a slope. She caught a branch half-mired in the mud along the shore, but her weight tugged it free. She held it for support.

  The creek opened wide and seemed to spill across a plain. The current pulled her sideways. The branch kept her up. She briefly felt the ground, firm enough to stand upon, but suddenly the water churned downward like a mudslide and Molly and the branch flowed toward a river. It was calmer in appearance, oddly white beneath the moon, massive and engorged and strewn with tiny flowers.

  Molly held tight. The river took control. She imagined it would take her to the sea unopposed, and parts of her desired that, and others stayed afloat.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  And then I found her, Tom thought, unbelievably alive.

  He’d distrusted her for months, but this was something new. The story she’d related and the plainness of the telling, all the facts lining up with terrible precision—she was either being honest and entrusting him with everything, or lying so atrociously he couldn’t bear to think it. She was General Bell’s daughter. She had shot her own brother. He believed it, every word, in spite of every reason not to.

  The vision of her clinging to the branch wouldn’t leave him so he followed it back, reversing course up the Antler, trying to think of where a creek might have merged with the river. She must have floated for hours, if she had started near Kinship, in water so cold it had weakened him in minutes. But if anything was surer than her talent for disaster, it was her lightning-proof, powder-charged talent for escape.

  She’d told the story start to finish with enough vivid detail that Tom was left to focus most keenly on the gaps. She had described John Summer and their private conversations but had naturally withheld specifics of their intimacy. He pictured them together: Molly’s mouth pressed to John’s, Molly’s breasts, Molly’s hips. Once he started, it was difficult to stop. Molly’s knees.

  She’d described her brother’s looks but not their physical resemblance. She had General’s Bell’s nose—did Nicholas, as well? Tom was led against his will to visualize the child, little Cora, like a newborn Molly, light as fleece. What had taken her? The potion, or the waters of the creek?

  He thought of the gun in Molly’s hand and wished he could have fired it.

  “You’re sure your brother is dead?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He might have lived. I was shot—”

  “I didn’t miss,” Molly said. “I shot him in the heart.”

  She focused on a mouse hole opposite the bed, a crevice at the bottom of the wall near the corner. She’d been looking at the hole when there was light enough to see it. Now the twilight hues had hidden it from sight and still Molly stared, disconcertingly immobile. He could just see her face outlined beside him. If she breathed, he
couldn’t hear it.

  “What of John Summer?”

  Molly shook her head in weary resignation. “Nicholas drowned a man for threatening us. He must have killed John.”

  “Your baby,” Tom said, catching on the words. He blotted out the thought of tiny feet, tiny fingers.

  “He knew that I would never let her go,” Molly said. “There was only one way. He thought I might believe him.”

  Tom considered other questions, other challenges and hopes, but what would truly help her now that everything was final? Still he wanted, for himself, to cut the blackest parts away.

  “Cora,” Molly said. “I don’t remember touching her. I loved her more than anyone and never even saw her.”

  Tom held her as she cried, curling her toward him with an arm around her waist and his other hand soft upon her hair. He felt her ear. Her face was at his chest, dampening his shirt. She hugged him forcefully and painfully, her fingertips digging at the ribs around his back. He lost his balance, pulled her down, and lay with her beside him while her teeth, bared to sob, pressed against his collarbone.

  She clawed at him and seemed afraid of slipping from his side, and not since the morning he had caught her in the river did it seem so imperative to keep her in his grasp. He wished that he could quiet her by swallowing her sounds and worried that her crying could be heard throughout the tavern.

  Molly’s forehead and nose smudged around his lips. He tasted salt and felt her mouth gasping open on his cheek. He hoped she wouldn’t roll and notice his arousal. He did everything to weaken it, remembering her story’s bleakest moments as he hugged her, but her voice came through, pink and sweet within her sobs, and she was emanating heat and pressing with her bosom. They clung with sweaty clothes, and loss and reassurance, and the dark made the ceiling and the bed disappear. They were rhythmically together and he held her till she calmed.