Bell Weather (46 page)

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.

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 seemed 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.

“I want to see him,” Bess said.

“I can’t allow that now.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t questioned him yet,” Pitt said.

“Then what are you doing here? Ask him! Go and ask him!” Bess said, and pushed him on the chest. “It might have been Tom, it might have been anyone. I’m the one with reason, but you haven’t even asked me if I killed my own father.”

“Did you?” Pitt croaked, scared to hear the answer.

Bess punched him on the shoulder—twice—very hard.

“No!” she said. “I didn’t! But instead of asking me or asking Tom or finding Molly, you’ve been here doing nothing! I want to talk to Tom. I need to know, I need to ask him.”

Yet she didn’t leave the bedroom and march up the hall, but rather threw herself backward on the bed and closed her eyes. She looked too dramatic, like a child playing dead, except she had the special wildness that often comes with grief and made him think, once again, of throwing punches at a tree. But he couldn’t let emotion weaken his advantage. He had doubts enough already, holes he couldn’t fill, an opportunity at last to set things right.

*   *   *

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

Tom could hear his cousin clearly as he sat inside the holding room, but desperate as he was to call back and reassure her, shouting would be fruitless. He had no self-defense; insistence wouldn’t help. If even a sliver of Bess believed he was guilty, the sliver would infect her, and the same went for Pitt and everyone else in town.

Each time he peeked out the window through the bars, another group of neighbors had appeared just below, defying the cold to gossip in the dirty silver daylight. He felt the news spreading through the town like a spill, impossible to stop and freezing into shapes. He knew that first impressions would be difficult to shake. Once it crossed people’s minds that he might have killed his uncle, they would always think him capable of murdering his kin.

He himself wasn’t certain of his innocence or guilt.

He had woken in a stupor, only listening at first, unable to open his eyes when Pitt and two men—he couldn’t tell who—appeared in his room and jostled him in bed. He couldn’t understand the depth of his paralysis. “Murder” and “arrest,” he heard. “Lemuel” and “fire.” When they hauled him out of bed, his head dangled back and there were fists holding lanterns, smeary in his vision. He couldn’t walk or speak and everything was fogged. They lugged him into the holding room and locked him in alone, and there he moaned in his confusion, in the darkness and the daze until the dawn light came, roseate and thin, and he discovered his bloodied hands and smelled the acrid smoke. They had searched him, he remembered. He had bruises on his ribs.