Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  She bent her knees and jumped, using her hands for extra lift and vaulting over the rail. Her skirts ballooned, her heavy cloak fluttered as she fell, and with a long cry of “Help!” she hit the water like a bomb.

  The slap was agonizing, hard across the bottoms of her thighs. The salt rinsed her arms and made the punctures sting anew, and she was tossed about, blind, tumbling over underwater. She wrestled with her heavy cloak, regretting that she hadn’t taken it off before she jumped, and when her mouth broke the surface and she finally drew a breath, the ship was farther, much farther out of reach than she had expected.

  Shouts of sailors overlapped in the chaos on the deck. Waves flopped her under, bobbed her up and pulled her down, coming from all directions in the dark, choppy harbor. Had a minute passed? More? She was tired from her journey, having barely slept or eaten, and her strokes became desperate and increasingly inept.

  At last a sailor found her. Molly hadn’t seen him jump or noticed his approach before he caught her under the arm—a young man, handsome with a cheek-wide scar—and vigorously swam her to the stern of the halting ship. He looped her with a rope and she was hauled up the side. Lantern-lit faces watched her from the taffrail: worried, stern, angry. Only Grigory looked perplexed.

  Many hands helped her up and she collapsed on deck, lying on her back and gazing at the rigging. Her rescuer returned, barely winded from the swim.

  Captain Lark made her stand.

  “Merman’s hell,” he said, his heartworn air turned to savage irritation. “How in all the fucking world did you tumble over the rail?”

  “He threw me,” Molly said.

  She raised a shivery finger and extended it at Grigory. The sailors’ darkened faces found a new thing to watch.

  “I didn’t touch her,” Grigory said. “She tried to drown herself.”

  “Liar!” Molly answered, with an angry flow of tears. “You’ve been a coward and a fiend since the morning we were married.”

  He laughed in nervous shock. “I ain’t her bloody husband.”

  “You’d deny even that? Oh, it’s you who should have drowned!”

  Molly lunged as if to hit him. A sailor held her back. Another man strong-armed Grigory beside her at the rail and Captain Lark looked at them together with his spitfire eyes, so much taller than the two of them that they had to tip their heads.

  “Why’d he throw you over?”

  “On account of my sickness!” Molly said. “He said it was a rash, a common sort of rash, and that I shouldn’t let it hinder us from traveling overseas. But he knew! He meant to drown me and be rid of me for good. He would have waited for the wide-open sea to throw me in, except my wounds started weeping and I showed him straightaway. I said we have to tell the captain, said it’s evil not to tell. But no, he said, he wouldn’t spend a month locked in quarantine. And then he picked me up—”

  Captain Lark had backed away. So had everyone on deck, all with pale, troubled faces.

  “Show your wounds,” the captain said.

  A sailor raised a lantern. Molly rolled her sleeves up, exposing both arms, as roughly as she could so the friction made her bleed again. Many of the crew retreated to the masts. Some escaped altogether to the bow or into the berth. Even Grigory stepped away, bewildered and aghast.

  Captain Lark regarded her with terrible rigidity. “You brought bloodpox onto my ship.”

  “I’m sorry!” Molly said. “Please, I didn’t know!”

  “But you did,” he said, hulking over Grigory. “I’d flay you raw and flog you with your own ragged skin if there weren’t fucking judges that would label it excessive.”

  “It ain’t true,” Grigory said, dry-mouthed and panting with his back against the rail. “I didn’t know. I didn’t touch her, never seen her in my life except—”

  He faltered—he could not admit he’d known her as a Maimer—and was simply too confused to conjure up a lie, especially one that might explain the state of Molly’s arms.

  Captain Lark acted swiftly. A sullen, fumbling sailor was ordered to bind Grigory’s arms. Afraid to touch a man whose wife had the pox, he tied a complicated knot, a kind of double double bowline, draped the loops around Grigory’s wrists without touching his hands, and tightened it by backing up and tugging on the rope. The man who’d rescued Molly doused himself with vinegar—he wasn’t alone in doing so—but the crew was already avoiding him, and Captain Lark ordered him, along with the half-dozen sailors who had helped Molly up, to pack whatever they owned and ride the jolly boat to shore.

  Molly and Grigory were seated in the little vessel’s stern. The miserable rowers sat with their oars, deathly silent, while the boat was quickly lowered off the ship and into the water. They rowed for dear life as soon as they detached. Dick’s Fortune spread its sails and hastened on its way; they would scour, burn, or boil everything Molly had touched, but they’d be damned if they allowed themselves to spend a month in quarantine.

  The rowers crossed the harbor to the dreaded Scabbard Island, where they would stay in isolation till a doctor could examine them. They would all be free to leave once the ruse had been exposed, but Molly and Grigory would not—they’d be held to answer questions. Rumors of the incident would soon ignite the docks: bloodpox, a woman nearly murdered in the harbor. Nicholas would hear of it by morning at the latest.

  Molly squeezed her arms but failed to dull the pain. If she couldn’t escape the island, if she couldn’t get to Tom, she’d have guaranteed the end. There would be nothing left to save.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Molly paced a stone-walled room in Scabbard Island’s quarantine hospital, a long, gray building with a straight central corridor, which owing to its bolted doors and iron-barred windows might have been mistaken for a derelict prison. The island itself appeared pestilential. It was three square miles of craggy land and wind-twisted trees, situated in the north of Grayport Harbor and inhabited by enough rats and fleas to sicken all of Floria. Half a decade had passed since Grayport had suffered a serious outbreak of contagious disease; the hospital was poorly funded even during emergencies, and virtually abandoned in prolonged seasons of health. Physicians stayed on the mainland, and the caretaker and his assistants were quick to lock Molly and Grigory in isolated quarters—both to be examined, the latter to be arrested. They had failed to keep the jolly boat’s sailors on the island: a disastrous breach of protocol in the case of actual disease, now disastrous to Molly if the story reached her brother. A doctor wouldn’t be summoned till the morning, she believed, and she needed those hours. She had gone from trap to trap.

  But although her solitude seemed to last a great deal longer, she had been in the room for less than three hours when a door banged open up the hall and she heard a familiar, belligerent baritone say:

  “It isn’t pox, you good-for-nothing clod, although I’ll see you sacked and whipped for letting those sailors row away. What if they’d been sick? And they were witnesses, to boot, against the man who tried to kill her. Where the blazes have you put her?”

  “Here, sir,” the caretaker said.

  “God’s sake, quit trembling,” Pitt told him at the door. “I said it isn’t pox. Open up. She won’t infect you.”

  Molly retreated to the inmost corner of the room, anxiously amazed by the unexpected rescue, if rescue it could properly be called. They opened the door. The caretaker shrank to the side too quickly to be seen, and then instead of Sheriff Pitt, whose voice had filled the hall, in walked Tom with an expression of relief—urgent, high-colored, ravenous relief.

  Molly rushed to him with a gasp and hugged him like a wife. Tom squeezed back; they didn’t come apart. She turned her head as she was holding him and looked to Sheriff Pitt, his wind-burned face wonderful to see, and she was startled when he winked at her and smiled with affection.

  He was followed by a priestly-looking man of middle age, his shoulders lightly dusted from an overpowdered wig. His cheeks were clearly mottled with the lingering marks of blo
odpox. He introduced himself as Dr. Antickson and rolled up Molly’s sleeves, examining her arms as Pitt raised a lantern and allowing her, throughout, to keep holding Tom.

  “It is not the disease,” he said, nevertheless concerned and squinting at the punctures.

  “I did it with a pin,” Molly said.

  The doctor frowned.

  Tom stepped back—how it ached to lose his warmth!—and licked his thumb to clean a portion of the blood from Molly’s wrist. She kissed him to apologize for leaving him behind, and he forgave her with a nod and a drawn-out sigh.

  “You can marry up later,” Pitt said, sending the doctor away with the caretaker to wait at the end of the hall and closing the door for privacy.

  Tom and Pitt had slipped away from Root, ridden all day, and found a constable in Grayport shortly after dark. They had only hoped to learn the address of James Smith and instead had heard a story of the ship Dick’s Fortune. Bloodpox panic had indeed reached the docks. One of the rowers from the jolly boat had drowned his fear in rum and spoken, in his drunkenness, of everything he’d witnessed. The rumor spread quickly, authorities were summoned, and the sailors were arrested and returned to Scabbard Island. Sheriff Pitt volunteered to accompany the prisoners; the pox-dreading constable was happy to allow it.

  “Pitt knows about your brother,” Tom said to Molly, “but we haven’t told anybody else what we know.”

  “Strictly secret,” Pitt said. “What the deuce happened?”

  Molly told about the note, her flight from Root, and Shepherd’s Inn; how her brother had killed Lem to compromise Tom; how he had forced her onto the ship; and how she had managed to escape. It chimed with what they knew and already suspected, but she stunned them by revealing that her brother led the Maimers.

  “This Grigory up the hall,” Pitt said. “He’s a Maimer?”

  Molly nodded. Pitt responded with a dark-lit grin: to have caught one alive was more than he had hoped.

  “He’s all yours,” Tom said. “Get your name in the Grayport Gazette.”

  “And Nicholas?” Molly asked.

  Tom’s heat had left her body and the cold felt deathly, worse than dampness and depletion, worse than ordinary fear. The warm cooperation that had unified the men was suddenly replaced by an unforeseen chill.

  Pitt massaged his hands and said to Tom, “You didn’t tell me he was heading up the Maimers.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s a new cast of light. I might consider our agreement null and void, to catch the leader. Might be worth it if you let me take him in.”

  Tom inhaled so fully that he seemed about to levitate. He turned away from Molly, failing to conceal his unexplained euphoria, and searched Pitt’s face as if he couldn’t quite believe the overture his lifelong enemy had made. Molly stood alone and didn’t understand. She was picturing her brother’s neck snapping at the gallows.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Tom said. “It’s still for Molly to decide.”

  Pitt addressed her softly with a hand upon her shoulder, reminding her how thoroughly he fathomed what was coming. “He’s your brother. It’s a damned hard thing either way.”

  “Don’t arrest him,” Molly said, unsure if that was even what the two of them were offering. “Tom and I will go.”

  Tom suppressed whatever emotion he had felt and squeezed her hand, joining them together for the task that lay ahead. Molly turned to Pitt and kissed him on the cheek, much to his uncomfortable delight, Tom’s pique, and her own bright sense of putting things right.

  * * *

  Nicholas slept in his spartan room over the Grayport office and woke before light the next morning, initially convinced, owing to exhaustion and the nighttime cold, that he was still in the winter cabin, that Molly had tried to shoot him the previous day, and that he had lost her in the onrushing waters of the creek.

  The present returned in a flash. She was alive. He had found her. He had sent her back to Bruntland.

  Yet the gnawing, tightening grief did not relax but rather sharpened as he thought of her at sea, suffering and hating him. A burden to be borne, he thought. Another chronic illness. What could he have done, aside from sending her away? Nevertheless he clamped his mouth and wept against his pillow—half a minute, maybe less, of pressurized rue. It was all that he allowed himself, all that he could hazard if he meant to carry on. He rose from bed and dressed in the dark, ignoring his cough, his chill, his hunger and fatigue, and straightened his clothes by feel, resigned to solving the myriad complications of the day with the same force of will he might have used to ice a fever.

  He felt a premonition: something wrong about the morning. The mind, he knew, was capable of clandestine perceptions—of learning in the night, of discovering clues and patterns under the noise of conscious thought. Revelations bubbled up, masquerading as emotions, like the subtle voice of God or nature’s finer instincts.

  He left the room in dread and lingered in the staircase leading to the parlor, fearing an informant would be waiting outside to bring him news of trouble.

  If only Molly could see beyond the things he had taken. He had given her more, much more than she had earned, and although he couldn’t expect to win her gratitude or love, he prayed that she would keep her word of secrecy with Frances. Dear Frances, now the only soul alive left to love him. He admitted it was foolish, or at any rate a weakness, to let himself dwell on such a sentimental hope. Frances knew what he had told her—complicated lies—and she believed him to be upright, delicate, and pure. Had he ever been an innocent? He truly couldn’t say. Still, he cherished such a vision of himself through her eyes and wouldn’t have it slashed, maudlin as it was, any more than he would slash a real, living child.

  But the fact was already clear: Molly would expose him, maybe inadvertently but certainly, inevitably. Bewailing it was meaningless. In time she’d write to Root—how could he prevent it?—and discover Tom had been hanged. There was no one watching Root to see that Tom complied. Nicholas had trusted that a bluff would do the trick; but eventually, he knew, the man would come to Grayport. Tom had to die. He would see to that today; judges could be swayed in more than one direction.

  Nonetheless, he suspected that the worst was still to come. He had bought them a reprieve and forced his sister to accept it, but reprieves, like everything else, were destined to expire.

  He continued downstairs and opened the parlor door. A candle lit the room. Molly stood before him. Nicholas’s heart surged up and then collapsed, and for the first time in months, he doubted his resolve. She was flicker-lit and beautiful, a small bedraggled imp. Both her clothing and her hair had the haphazard look of having swirled undersea and dried however they fell. Nicholas wondered, reaching subtly for the knife inside his coat, if she had swum the harbor’s length without being seen.

  She didn’t speak. Her eyes were terrible and dark as little onyxes. Never had he entertained a suicidal urge and yet he felt one now, entwined with her appearance. If he drew the blade and killed her—intimately, swiftly—his succeeding act would surely be to turn it on himself.

  “Give me the ruddy fucking knife before I shoot you in the knee.”

  Tom Orange aimed a pistol from a shadow at his side.

  Nicholas handed him the knife, sagging with relief. The feeling didn’t last. He calcified and burned.

  “Sit,” Molly said.

  Nicholas didn’t move. Tom grabbed his neck and crammed him into a chair. The force hurt his clavicle and throbbed down his arm. Molly stood calmly in the center of the room while Tom stayed beside him with the pistol to his knee. A fine deterrent, he admitted, more reliable than aiming willy-nilly at his chest, and yet it told him they were not beyond a measure of restraint.

  He met Tom’s face and there it was—that marvelous temper again—but now it looked contained: a cannon packed and primed. Nicholas smiled at his knuckles, just enough for Tom to notice. Then he emptied his expression, knitted his fingers in his lap, raised his chin toward t
he candlelight, and asked his sister, “How?”

  * * *

  “You said it last night. I’m good at wriggling out.”

  The parlor, by and large, was just as Molly remembered. It was small, somewhat narrower in width than in length, with a ceiling she could touch by reaching overhead, bone-colored wainscot, and dark red walls. Nicholas had added ferns and books, which added richness, but had kept the same chairs and round mahogany table. The table bore a candle near the unlit hearth. Nicholas’s chair was in the middle of the rug. They had sat right here when she’d agreed to marry John, and it was strange, and reassuring, and inevitably chilling to be standing here with Tom for another confrontation.

  Molly had warned Tom that Nicholas was good at spotting weaknesses and turning them, abruptly, into precious opportunities. She’d asked him not to speak unless necessity compelled him.

  “You love her,” said her brother. “That was instantly apparent.”

  Tom neither blinked nor contradicted the assessment. Molly’s heart became an orange, nourishing and bright, and she was eager to be done before her brother got to squeeze it.

  “I warned you not to come,” Nicholas continued. “What if she had died because you tried to interfere?”

  “She was managing without me,” Tom said.

  “All her life.”

  “I’m a harder man to hurt when I’m standing here awake.”

  “The same cannot be said about your uncle,” Nicholas answered. “Did your cousin take it badly? Did she blame you, even briefly? What a wound: to be severed from the graces of your family.”

  “I wonder how a bullet in the knee measures up.”

  “Tom,” Molly said.

  “Dead matter,” said her brother, having toyed and grown bored. He looked at her instead and then the light was in his eyes. The flutter in his irises reminded her of wasps. “You were stronger after all and now you have me in your power. Let me clarify your options. One: let me go, and both of you are dead within the hour. Two: have me arrested for my crimes and see me hanged. Three: kill me now. The third choice is cleanest.”