Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  “And do you know what you created?” Molly yelled to crack his calm. “Your friend became a Maimer!”

  “Molly, you amaze me. I had thought you more astute. Did you think it a coincidence, an accident of fate, that your Maimer was a man who used to visit me in Grayport?”

  Molly shrank back, out of the moonlight into the dark. She seemed to spiral and descend, as on the night she’d given birth after swallowing the potion, and she understood that yes, she had known for several minutes now—had sensed it in the slush coldly rolling in her center.

  “I learned of it in Grayport, but not the full truth,” he said. “The second Maimer that night—the man whose nose you smashed before escaping up the road—was apparently ashamed to tell me what had happened. He told me they were ambushed by the sheriff and a posse, and that Mr. Crutch was dead before he reached Root. Had I learned a young woman had bested them, ridden off blind, and captured Mr. Crutch singlehanded, I would have known at once my sister was alive.”

  Molly whispered with a quarter of her breath, “Tell me why.”

  “I’m afraid the Maimers’ origin is lusterless,” he said. “An enterprise that blossomed more than I expected. Many individuals who came to me for help used private couriers to deliver important letters. They were a treasure trove of secrets—personal, professional, and highly confidential. I resolved to offer the city’s only safe delivery. All I had to do was thin the competition. As you know,” he said, “the shortest route between Grayport and Liberty is the road through the forest, and messages were sent despite the perils. If well-paid couriers were not dissuaded by wildcats, bears, and ordinary brigands, what would prompt terror? Shadow men with knives. It is one thing to risk money or belongings, quite another risking the most cherished parts of ourselves. I wish I knew whoever first called them Maimers. They became an instant legend. It was more than I had hoped.

  “Once news of the earliest victims reached Grayport, only the bravest couriers would travel on the road. Naturally they charged exorbitant rates, and I targeted the first such man who ventured out. The Maimers blinded him, preventing him from any future rides, and with the information gleaned from one of the letters he’d been carrying, I ruined a prominent trader with evidence of smuggling. People in Grayport grew nervous in the extreme about sending confidential messages. Soon they came to me, the man who solved their problems.

  “I offered the swiftest, craftiest couriers: men in my employ. People paid handsomely for guaranteed delivery. I couldn’t freely use the information in the letters—any evidence that I had read them would destroy my reputation—but I learned a great deal of cumulative value. The Maimers were instructed to attack random travelers to remove all suspicion that their motive was the mail. I owned the road and no one knew it.”

  The mattress was a sinkhole, cavernously deep. Molly touched her face and patterned it with blood. It smelled of old fear, sickly as a leech. The room was slick with gore, stuffed with tongues and ears and organs, and her head began to swim.

  “You’re a fiend,” she said. “Evil.”

  “I have intellect and will and opportunities to thrive. Should I not embrace my powers? Flourish in the wild?”

  “Do you not have a heart for everyone you’ve hurt?”

  “I do not,” Nicholas said, as if he’d thought about the question many times, many ways. “If I once had sympathy for others, I don’t remember losing it. I know I loved our mother—I was shattered when she died, but even then I had the instinct to partially conceal it. And I love you and Frances from a time, long ago, before the openhearted part of me withdrew and disappeared. Why it left me is a mystery. I cannot say I miss it. My love for you and Frances brought only pain.”

  He shrank as if the whole of him had atrophied and closed. His shoulders hunched forward and his spine seemed to slacken. When he spoke again, his voice was neither confident nor wise, but neither was it feeble. It was open. It was young.

  “All my life,” he said, “I have been beaten down by sickness, and circumstance, and the brutishness of those who deemed themselves stronger. Our father was determined to enfeeble and control me. When we broke Mrs. Wickware, I saw another way. When we finally left home, the world spread before us. And when we first arrived in Grayport—when sickness, circumstance, and commonplace brutes threatened us again—I refused to buckle under. I might have given in to terror and despair. Instead, I took control to shield myself from harm. I’d have shielded you, too—how emphatically I tried!—had you not struggled free and wounded me yourself.”

  Molly wobbled to her feet, making Nicholas raise the knife and look at her severely, but all she did was cross the room and stand before the stove. It was three small steps but she was desperate for the distance.

  He stood and said, “Have you never done harm to satisfy your needs? Have you never cut a path over someone else’s life?”

  “What have I done?” Molly asked, turning around to face him. “How can you suggest—”

  “Your refusal to behave led to Frances’s expulsion. We defied Mrs. Wickware and ground her to a pulp, but then you wavered and suggested it was I who lacked compassion. Did you not choose freely when we sailed away from Umber, knowing full well the dangers that awaited? Yet you pouted and complained while I fought to make it work, until at last you opposed me, openly and cruelly. Did you hesitate in trusting John Summer with our secrets? We had safety and prosperity. We finally had a home. What if someone had learned precisely who we were? Think of how a cunning individual could pin us. John Summer understood our delicate position and he used it—did you know?—when he came to me and forced me to consent to your engagement. How could I be certain that he wouldn’t press for more? I sent him north and made sure he never reached Burn. Still your pregnancy remained,” he said, swallowing to overcome a frailty in his voice. “Unmarried, unemployed—you were wholly unprepared. I offered a solution and beseeched you to accept it. You defied me and rejected it, forcing me to carry out the necessary acts.”

  She lunged for his knife. Nicholas stepped aside, much faster than she would have thought him capable of moving. He tripped her as she passed and held her face against the window.

  “You killed her,” Molly said, her tears a moony blur, “and meant to kill me.”

  “No,” Nicholas said.

  He grabbed the hair behind her head and forced her backward to the stove, and then he kept her there and faced her with the knife below her chin.

  “I left the pistol on the table, knowing you would see it. I hoped that you would find the gun loaded and refuse it, even if you blamed me, even if you hated me. If only we could pass that night without a shot, the worst would be behind us and we might return to Grayport—broken but together, possibly to heal. Perhaps, given time—”

  “I know I didn’t miss.”

  “A ball of wax,” Nicholas said, “that vaporized when fired. Not that your attempt didn’t pierce me to the core. Still, I would have saved you if you hadn’t washed away. I searched the creek for miles looking for your body, and eventually despaired. How did you come to Root?”

  She sniffed the blubbery mess escaping from her nose and said, “The waters flowed together.”

  “Ah,” Nicholas said. “It’s remarkable you floated so far and yet survived. There is more life in you, dear sister, than even I believed.” He lowered the knife and returned to the stool, choosing not to sit and speaking, with the moonlight haloing his ears, like a person who had memorized a noteworthy dream. “I returned to Grayport, holding to the tale that you had gone to live with relatives. I embellished the lie by saying I had sent you off for safety, that my efforts in the city—in particular my well-known defiance of the Maimers—had opened us to threats. How quickly people praised my extraordinary sacrifice. How little they suspected what my sacrifice had been.”

  Molly knelt beside the bed, unable to stand or answer. Nicholas turned his back to her and looked out the window at the forest, talking so his words made frost upon the glass.
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  He said, “This week a man in my employ tried to blackmail me. When his plan was uncovered, he attempted to escape. He was followed and shot, only to be saved by a sudden band of travelers. I hastened here to the inn to silence him myself. He appeared to die of his gunshot wound, an end that might have been questioned if the doctor coming from Root had been allowed to examine the body. The doctor was deterred. I was spending the night in this very room—a simple traveler, paying for his bed—when Sheriff Pitt and Tom Orange arrived with their remarkable news. It was grievous, losing all four Maimers in one swoop. If your town grew courageous, I could also lose the road. I followed Tom and Pitt the following day to take their measure—to discover what boldness might develop in the future.

  “Imagine my astoundment! I was so shocked with joy at finding you alive, I nearly cried your name on entering the tavern. I blended with the crowd to see what I could learn. Eventually I spoke to Abigail Knox. She was very forthcoming, even with a stranger, on the subject of the woman who’d embraced Tom Orange. ‘Her,’ she said. She spoke to me at length with little prompting. Your past remained a mystery to everyone in Root—to everyone, she said, except Tom Orange.

  “I was just about to leave, but what a spectacle ensued! Tom’s uncle shouting insults for everyone to hear, and Tom and Sheriff Pitt publicly at odds. The sheriff seemed of small concern, satisfied to bluster. Oh, but Tom. Fiery Tom, full of tempest and conviction. How to draw you off from such a formidable companion? Once I learned more, it was easier than fate.

  “I paid a boy to deliver your letter, waited for you to leave, and visited Lemuel Carver at his house. Again I told the truth. ‘I am Molly’s brother,’ I said. ‘I mean to steal her from the Orange.’ He let me in at once—I might have been John Lumen himself, such a thrill was in his face—and when I asked him for a drink, he turned to find a bottle. I struck him on the skull with a smoakwood stick. I cannot think the world will weep at his demise. He was far enough along before I ever came to Root. One could smell the putrefaction of a man approaching death.

  “But a man without friends might have lain there for days. I needed him found,” Nicholas said. “I broke a lantern in his home, waited near the woods until the flames began to spread, and then departed while the neighbors hurried out to find him and arrest the man most likely to have killed him.”

  Molly had passed through heat, like a seething of her blood, and shriveled now within, mummified with horror. The stove had almost cooled, the last log depleted to a black, withered husk. Molly wobbled on her knees and bumped her head against the iron, thinking of the stick that had cracked Lem’s skull. She remembered Lem’s tears when he spoke about his wife. She smelled the ashes and imagined Root pulsing from the flames.

  “The murder will occupy the town until I see you on your way,” Nicholas said. “I could have killed Tom and blamed it on Lem, but keeping Tom alive gives me power over you. Unless I’m very much mistaken and you don’t care a whit—”

  Molly stood in Tom’s defense on cold, deadened feet, choked by dual urges to confirm it or deny it.

  “As I hoped,” Nicholas said. “Understand, throughout it all, I have never aimed to hurt you. That was the effect, not the motive of my actions. I did everything I could to shelter you from harm. Now I offer you a choice I should have offered during your pregnancy—a choice I failed to give because I didn’t want to lose you. Come with me to Grayport, board a ship to Bruntland, and sail away from Floria to live again with Frances. She is living independently with money I have sent and will continue to provide. Our father will not find you.”

  The dark leapt alive at the sound of Frances’s name, brightening the stark gray sea in Molly’s mind. Oh! but even lighted, how it flooded around her head, terrible and vast. Back to Bruntland—it would drown her.

  “I offer you the freedom and the life you always craved,” he said. “Do whatever you will. Marry whomever you choose. Ask for anything you wish and I will happily provide it. But you must board the ship. You must not defy me. I have given Tom Orange word of your departure and will see that he is freed and restored to good standing. But if either of you speaks or works against me, now or later, Tom’s life, as well as yours, is immediately forfeit.”

  “You would kill me after all?”

  “I hope to see you live. As I said, returning you to Frances was a choice I should have offered you before. I have learned from my mistake. Have you learned from your own?”

  “I never made a mistake!” she cried. “I never asked for any of this! I would have stayed with Tom and had a home, if you had let me!”

  “Tell me truthfully, Molly—how have you fared in Root? More importantly,” he said, “how has Root fared with you? Has the tavern benefited from your presence? Has Tom Orange? Or have you rained complication onto everyone you’ve met? How sincerely do you care about your home, or Tom, or anyone in Root if your immediate impulse was to abandon them all to keep yourself from danger?”

  “I never meant to hurt them,” Molly said, and clutched her chest.

  “Sail away. Start fresh. Revel in your freedom. You have done so before with wonderful success. It is a quality of yours: a marvelous facility to wriggle out, adapt, and bloom without light. You have never been the smartest or the strongest,” Nicholas said, “but there is a Mollyness in you that nothing stunts or changes. You are as thoroughly yourself as in the hour you were born, and that is beautiful and rare. Take it with you. Take it home.”

  His knife had vanished into his sleeve. He opened his arms, defenseless, daring her to push him out the window or embrace him.

  “Everything I’ve done in Root was meant to save us both. I offer you escape, the very treasure you pursued tonight. Accepting it,” he said, “is merely following your nature.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Pitt did not consider himself unflappable or prudish, but Bess’s violent tears, combined with the careless state of her nightclothes, distressed him to the point where he began to doubt his character. He rarely saw crying so emphatic from adults and might have viewed her as a child—she was, after all, barely into womanhood—if not for how her breasts kept swaying in her shift. She hugged herself and rocked, leaning forward on her bed, and when he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his own brow, she thought he was being gentlemanly and plucked the cloth away. She blew her nose strongly, like a bugle underwater. Pitt reclaimed the kerchief, disconcerted by its soddenness, and laid it on the smoakwood chair beside the bed.

  She had stomped around her room, she had clutched her head and wept, and now she blinked and cleared her eyes and looked at him in anger. Pitt retreated half a step, trying to focus on her face and wishing she would tie the open laces at her bosom. He took a blanket from the bed and draped her back, and Bess cocooned herself within it, just as he had hoped. Once again he backed away and hazarded a question.

  “Can you remember anything he said or did after he left the taproom?”

  “I already told you,” Bess said. “The last I saw Tom was when he stormed upstairs.”

  “He slept all day?”

  “And through the night, far as I know. He told us not to knock. We let him be, all but Molly.”

  “When—”

  “I couldn’t say, I wasn’t mindful of the time. It was dark. I gave her a letter from the table and she clomped upstairs, and when I came to bed she wasn’t in the room and I was glad of it. She’d spoken awful mean to me and didn’t seem herself.”

  Bess focused on the bunched-up blanket in her fists, then glowered up at Pitt as if he’d tricked her into wearing it.

  He cleared his throat. The effort made him genuinely cough. He could have used a handkerchief but didn’t have a spare, and so he swallowed his phlegm and asked her, “Do you know who sent the letter?”

  “Abigail,” she said. “Molly recognized the hand but wouldn’t open it in front of me.”

  “And why did you assume she went to Tom at such an hour?”

  Bess scowled at his chest and s
eemed bitterly resentful—not of the questions he was asking, but of the whole dreadful morning. He couldn’t rightly fault her if she didn’t want to talk, but Bess was all he had aside from Ichabod and Nabby, one mute, the other scolding him for locking up Tom.

  “Where else would Molly have gone, if not to Tom?” Pitt said.

  “I don’t know!” Bess cried.

  She stood and threw the blanket off and hugged him with a thump, pillowy and warm and dampening his waistcoat. He held her close with fatherly intent and manly panic. How she cried and wet his collar, squeezing out his air—he swore that he would care for her however he was able, forcing down the thought that she would make a lovely wife.

  She shoved him off. He feared his thoughts had been apparent through his hug but she was only growing frantic from the horror of it all.

  “It wasn’t Tom! I don’t believe it! Not until he says it!”

  Bess’s volume, too hysterical, belied her growing doubt. She faced him, standing upright and gorgeous in her fury, in her fear and her confusion, while her world collapsed around her.

  Pitt could see in her the brokenness he’d felt long ago, when devotion to his father smudged into loathing. He had beaten on the hangman’s tree until his knuckles bled. He’d kicked his own dog the day of the execution, then regretted it and wept when the dog cringed away. He still blamed his father—first for giving away the tavern, then for shooting Mr. Orange, then for dying in disgrace.

  Blaming Tom was something else: irrational, ingrained. Was it simply that their fathers hadn’t lived to bear the guilt? All he knew was that the Oranges were equally at fault and Tom had gone years without acknowledging the stain.