Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  “You seem content that one of us should die,” Molly said.

  “Resignation,” he replied, “differs from contentment.”

  “Were you equally resigned the night you killed my daughter?”

  She walked toward Tom and grabbed the pistol in his hand. Tom was in her shadow with the candlelight behind her but she felt his rising temperature, the tension in his arm, his panic that the gun had left her brother’s knee. He wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t turn from Nicholas, who watched them with an eggsnake’s tireless attention. They had agreed upon the plan—Tom restrained him, Molly talked—but now her move had overturned it, leaving both of them uncertain. Tom released the gun and quickly raised the knife.

  Molly backed away and aimed the pistol at the floor.

  “Explain to me again the necessity you felt,” she said. “Tell me all the reasons you devised. Do you dare?”

  She calmed her trembling hand by tightening her grip. First the gun shook more. Then she raised it and it steadied. Nicholas seemed to follow her example with his features, tautening his brow and narrowing his mouth, though what he meant to govern—his defiance or his fear—was impossible to tell.

  “Given the chance,” Nicholas said, “I will steal, and maim, and hurt your loved ones again. You would be right to kill me now. Even God wouldn’t blame you.”

  She glimpsed his broken tooth and thought of the locket she was wearing. Tom raised a cautionary hand but didn’t speak.

  “Tell me where your instinct leans,” Nicholas said.

  “Kill you,” Molly answered.

  “Trust it.”

  “Let you live.”

  “Choose,” Nicholas told her, creaking forward in the chair.

  The emptiness inside her bloomed and filled the parlor, blotting out her memory, and certainty, and hope until the pistol in her hand and Nicholas in the chair became the only two things that were holding her together.

  Tom had seen her indecision and begun to drop his guard. He seemed prepared to block the shot—a shot she might regret—and stepped toward her with an outstretched arm to take the gun. Nicholas faced the candle. It was close enough, she realized, that he might blow it out and plunge them into darkness.

  Nicholas inhaled and focused on the flame. “Consider the possibility that Cora is alive.”

  Molly’s vision flared. She almost pulled the trigger in surprise. Nicholas exhaled and made the candlelight wobble, and the furniture and walls swayed with bending shadows.

  “Where?” she asked, choked.

  “If she were,” Nicholas said, neither venomous nor kind, “telling you would cost me my advantage.”

  “Then I’ll shoot you.”

  “Yet there may come a time, assuming I’m alive, when I have no need of my advantage anymore.”

  Visions filled her mind—wispy hair, dimpled elbows. Caramel skin. She’d have given up her tongue or any of her limbs, anything, to hold her. Anything but this. Was she out there now in the city or beyond, parentless and wholly undefended with a stranger? Had another mother nursed her? Would she ever know the difference?

  “Molly,” Tom said. He interposed himself, forcing her to look at him instead. “Will he tell you if I hurt him?”

  “No,” Molly whispered.

  Tom put the knife away and turned around to Nicholas. “Shoot you, don’t shoot you. Bargaining and bluffs. My head was hammer and tongs before you started talking.”

  Tom punched him in the nose: a good, damp thump. Nicholas bled and held his face, too surprised to offer resistance when Tom yanked him up by his hair, produced a rope from under his coat, and tied his wrists behind his back. Molly used a second length of rope to bind his ankles. Tom bumped the backs of Nicholas’s knees, bending both legs and causing him to kneel, and then he joined the wrist and ankle knots together into a hogtie and stood beside Molly, nodding at their handiwork. Nicholas’s nose dribbled down his shirt.

  Tom took a three-inch bottle from his pocket, uncorked the top, and said, “Dr. Benjamin Knox sends his regards.”

  “It’s to be ironic punishment, then,” Nicholas said. “Will you chop my hand, as well?”

  “No,” Molly said. “You’re sailing off whole.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “New employment,” Tom said. “It’ll suit you.”

  “Wherever it is,” Nicholas told Molly, speaking through the blood flowing over his lips, “I will see you again.”

  “But you won’t kill me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It isn’t in your nature,” Molly said.

  Nicholas smiled.

  Tom handed her the bottle, pinched her brother’s nose, and moved to open his jaw.

  “Stop,” Nicholas said with nasal irritation.

  Molly touched Tom’s arm and he released her brother’s face. Nicholas looked at her with bottomless, profoundly earnest eyes and tipped his head back. She placed the bottle’s rim upon his lip and poured the fluid into his mouth. It had a dream-heavy scent. He let it trickle in and swallowed with a blink.

  There was a long and awkward silence, not a word for several minutes, while they waited for the potion to deliver its effect.

  “I might kill you,” Nicholas said to Tom.

  “Ruddy hell,” Tom said. “You told me he was stoical.”

  Molly stuck her pinky into the freshly drained bottle. She removed it with a pop and sucked the moisture off her fingertip, savoring the hint of salty-sweet cherry.

  Nicholas tried to say, “Are you sure the doctor’s formula was properly prepared?” Instead he slurred, “Formula prepared the doctor proper?”

  “Aye,” Tom said.

  Nicholas drooled and gibbered. In another half minute, he collapsed upon the floor.

  Sleeping like a baby, Molly thought. She didn’t cry. Instead she used a handkerchief to clean his bloody face, wondered whether he had lied, and prayed that he had not.

  * * *

  Four hours later, Molly and Tom stood on the dock in the overcast, pewter-lit morning and watched the Lady’s Way spread her sails and cut across Grayport Harbor. She carried an unmarked crate deep within her hold, delivered and received shortly after dawn, and once she was safely in the open sea, certain members of the crew planned to discover a man packed inside, overlook the ropes that bound his feet and hands, and arrest him as a stowaway on their voyage to the prison colony of Exanica, which lay across the ocean to the distant south of Bruntland and always had a place for fresh criminal laborers. The captain knew Tom’s brother Winward—they had served together in the navy—and had asked few questions while agreeing to assist. He had been warned, nonetheless, to overestimate the prisoner.

  The docks were crowded but subdued, owing to the bloodpox rumor from the night. Molly kept her hood up, fearing that one of the passing sailors or merchants might recognize her face from her Grayport days. She watched the Lady’s Way becoming smaller in the harbor till it looked like a toy she could carry in her palm.

  Tom held her waist as if expecting her to fall. He wore his tricorne and had the bearing of a general who had ridden all night but couldn’t afford to rest. Molly held him, too, sensing it was he who needed the support.

  “How are your arms?” Tom asked.

  “They hurt. You look good in that hat. I fancy one myself.”

  He smiled at the sea but seemed to be preoccupied. Molly couldn’t read him and was too fatigued to try.

  Pitt approached them from the far end of the dockyard, where he had just stepped off a cutter from Scabbard Island. His authoritative swagger was belied by his shortness, and by the cavalier seamen who refused to clear a path. They made him step around or bumped him moving past, until at very long last he reached Tom and Molly with little more authority than a messenger boy.

  He sniffed to stop a trickle, then again with more intention.

  “Grigory is dead,” he said. “The caretaker left him unguarded while I interrogated the jolly boat sailors. He swears that nobody e
lse came to the island, but how would he know? The bastard was hiding in his room, still afraid of pox.”

  Tom removed his hat as if its weight had grown oppressive. “How did he die?”

  “Someone cut his throat. The room was locked and there was no sign of struggle. He was lying on the floor like his neck just opened on its own.”

  Pitt said it thickly with a marble-eyed stare, turning his gaze from Tom to Molly without seeming to recognize the difference. Molly held her neck and felt herself swallow. Was it odd to pity Grigory, a Maimer and a fiend, for failing in his mission to convey her overseas?

  “Your brother…,” Pitt said, blinking in the wind.

  Molly swung her arm, rigid as a weathervane, and pointed at the vessel far across the harbor.

  “He’s nailed inside a crate,” Tom said.

  They fell into grim silence, looking at the ship and huddled, all three with Molly in the middle, while the overcrowded dock made their worries more anonymous but left them more exposed, in the wake of Grigory’s death, to whatever secret forces had achieved his execution. Life went on around them, full of hidden threats. They watched the barrels being loaded, ropes being tied, a thousand machinations following their courses.

  “How do we explain this?” Pitt eventually asked.

  “We can’t tell the truth,” Tom said to Molly. “Your own brother, the leader of the Maimers, sent away without a trial—people will think the worst.”

  “We have to tell them something,” Pitt said. “At the very least, we need to explain Lem’s murder.”

  Molly dropped her hood and scruffed her matted hair.

  “We blame Grigory for everything,” she said. “He was the one with murderers and thieves at his disposal. My well-respected brother, Jacob Smith, sent me away for safety while he worked against Grigory’s network in Grayport. Last spring, Grigory kidnapped me for advantage. I escaped by jumping into the flooded creek, and then I stayed in Root—and kept my past a secret—so Grigory wouldn’t find me. But he did. He came to Root when you and Tom stopped the Maimers. He murdered Lem and framed Tom to keep the two of you occupied while he tried to steal me off again. I fled to Grayport and hoped to find my brother for protection, but Grigory caught me on the road. You and Tom,” she said, “worked enough of it out in Root and followed me to Grayport, where you rescued me and had Grigory arrested. He killed himself in jail. My brother disappeared, probably murdered by Grigory’s supporters.”

  It was a lie that might suffice, being very close to the truth, with no one to oppose it now that Grigory was dead.

  “But people here thought you and Nicholas—you and Jacob,” Tom said, “were married.”

  “We had enemies abroad and changed our identities to hide.”

  “What did you really fake a marriage for?” Pitt asked.

  “That’s my secret to keep. So is my daughter,” Molly said.

  The eastern clouds began to fracture and the Lady’s Way passed through a clear band of sun. It lit the sails with splendor, giving the distant ship a gold-spangled light before it sank back to shadow, gone toward the sea, with Nicholas and everything he knew inside its hold.

  “People will think your brother died fighting the Maimers,” Tom said. “If he ever makes it back, he’ll be a hero.”

  “Makes it back!” Pitt said, scorching at the thought. His reputation—and the lie they meant to foist upon the town—depended on the fact that Nicholas was gone. “You said the two of you would handle— It’s the only reason I didn’t arrest the son of a bitch myself!”

  “Not the only reason,” Tom said. “But no one comes back from Exanica anyway.”

  The blood-drop potion might have killed him already. Benjamin had failed to tell Tom the proper dosage; they had decided they were better off emptying the bottle, guaranteeing that he slept as long as they required. Molly had seen him almost die of seasickness alone. She thought of how debilitated he had grown doing Mrs. Wickware’s chores; even if he reached the prison colony alive, it seemed impossible that he would survive a year, a month, a solitary week of hard physical labor.

  The Lady’s Way dipped and vanished out of sight.

  “He isn’t coming back,” she said, knowing he would come.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Orange remained closed. Molly, Tom, and Pitt had returned the previous day to flabbergast Root with the tale of Grigory’s crimes and the final events in Grayport, then retreated to the quiet isolation of their homes, leaving the town to talk and wonder and embroider on its own. The trio had reemerged this morning for Lem’s burial, and afterward Molly walked Bess home to the tavern, guided her into their room, and closed the door behind them. They settled on a bed and Molly held her hand. It was a hand with bitten fingernails, a child’s smooth knuckles, and lifelong calluses below them on the palm.

  Bess had heard the story same as everyone in Root. That her father had been murdered seemed to matter less than that he’d died while he and Bess remained bitterly at odds. Lem had gained the pitiable glow of many dead brutes and now his silence, so different from the bluster of his life, allowed the finer whispers of her memory to rise. Molly understood. She felt the same about her brother now that he was gone, and she remembered all the ways he once protected her from harm.

  But the time had come for Bess to know the truth in all its ugliness, and Molly told her everything as clearly as she could—her childhood, her father, John Summer, and her baby. Nicholas and the Maimers. Nicholas and Lem. She rushed it out efficiently and tried to get it done before the pressure in her chest prevented her from speaking.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said. “It was him. I let him go. I couldn’t see him hanged, oh I’m sorry … Bess, I’m sorry.”

  Bess had dug her fingers like talons into the mattress and had listened, rarely blinking, never once interrupting. Her astonishment at learning General Bell was Molly’s father had diminished when she learned that Nicholas had murdered Lem. They were sitting hip to hip and Molly hugged her from the side, if only to hide her own face and keep herself from rambling. Bess’s stomach grumbled softly and she didn’t hug back. The hearth fire hadn’t yet heated up the room and the warmth between their bodies grew thin.

  “You’re bleeding,” Bess said.

  Molly let go. Her left-arm bandage had begun to seep through. Bess unraveled it and scowled at the irritated skin. She dabbed the blood with a cloth and studied the deepest wounds, each of which Molly could remember having made, as if the memories she’d called upon were labeled on her arm.

  Bess applied a tingly mint salve with her fingers, took a fresh strip of linen, and began to wrap the arm again.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Molly said. “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” Bess said. “I’m sorry about your baby.”

  She proceeded with the second wrap, and Molly let her do it, sensing that her friend’s insistent ministrations were as comforting to Bess as to her own throbbing arms. Sun filled the room and tricked the iciness away. The finished bandage spiraled neatly from her elbow to her wrist, and Bess secured it with a pin and pulled down the sleeve. She looked at Molly up close and kissed her on the lips. It was sisterly and sweet and pleasantly insouciant, raising shivers like the salve she’d applied to Molly’s wounds.

  “You’re staying now for good?”

  “Yes,” Molly said.

  “Do you love him?”

  Molly smiled.

  “We’ll be family if you marry him.”

  But something hadn’t been right about Tom since they returned. It was more than Lem’s burial and worry over Bess, more than the exertion of the last few days. Molly hadn’t found a chance to speak with him alone. She had spent the night with Bess, dreaming of ships and Grigory’s death and little Cora on her own, and she had woken up scared and hadn’t felt at home. Every minute was a footstep leading to the next but she had no clear sense of which direction they would go.

  * * *

  Tom stood with his back to the wi
ndow in the Knoxes’ kitchen, taking the twilight draft directly into his spine. Abigail added an extra log to the fire, an uncharacteristic extravagance—she thought of deadfall as God’s good reminder of the grave—but one she willingly bestowed for the comfort of the guests. Benjamin sat at the table, genial and talkative but shiveringly frail. Molly sat beside him like a well-loved niece. Tom admired his friend’s acuity in sensing her discomfort. It would never have crossed Benjamin’s mind that Molly might blame herself for costing him a hand, but once he’d read it in her manner, he behaved with more fragility, allowing her to help him into his chair, cover his shoulders with a blanket, and remain by his side in heartfelt penance.

  “It’s time to change your bandage,” Abigail said.

  “May I help?” Molly asked, standing up and walking forward.

  Abigail paused without at first replying. She went to a cabinet for an earthenware jar and fresh supplies, laid them on the table in front of Benjamin, and summoned Molly over to a basin near the window, where she washed Molly’s hands and scrubbed beneath her fingernails. Molly looked pleased, familiar with Benjamin’s fixity on cleanliness and seeming to believe, through the careful preparation, that Abigail was showing her a great deal of trust.

  Benjamin removed his sullied bandage, which Abigail deposited into a boiling pot of water. It was an ugly wound. The flesh had shriveled since the cut and gradually retracted. Now the forearm bones protruded slightly from the muscles and would probably result, once the stump was fully healed, in noticeable bumps instead of the smoother, neater surface of a proper amputation.

  Molly stood there, expressionless, long enough for Abigail to question her resolve, but then she sat and got to work as calmly as a surgeon.

  Benjamin watched her over his glasses. He smiled reassuringly and said, “First a gentle cleansing. Dab lightly. Do not rub.”

  Molly did as she was told and asked him, “Does it hurt?”

  “I am reasonably dosed to tolerate the pain. Next the unguent,” Benjamin said, pointing with his chin toward the earthenware jar.