Bell Weather (49 page)

“I’m going to the head,” she said.

“Happy to assist.”

“Did my brother tell you what happened to the last man who troubled me at sea?”

“Ain’t no trouble if you’re willing,” Grigory said, but then he stood aside and let her go without impediment.

The main facilities were unenclosed holes along the bowsprit, visible to anybody standing on deck. Molly approached Captain Lark, a wide-mouthed giant with a heartbroken manner, and he granted her permission to relieve herself below. A friendly midshipman led her into the quarter gallery, hung a lantern from a ceiling hook, and left her there alone.

The room was dankly cold and solid oak, floor to ceiling. Paneled windows canted outward at the stern, a bench with cushioned seating spanned the rear wall, and a scarred, heavy table with a brass candelabrum stood fastened into place on a mildewed rug. Molly felt ill, much worse than at the taffrail, but instead of using the head she sat on the bench below the windows, removed her cloak, and rolled her sleeves as high as they would go.

She took the pin she’d pricked her finger on and touched it to her forearm. The point was rather dull; she would need to use pressure. The first quick puncture brought water to her eyes. A perfect bead of blood issued with the sting, smearing when she moved the pin’s tip just beside it. The second and the third pricks were closer to her veins. She thought of Lem’s scars, numerous as freckles. Then she thought of Bess, parentless and sobbing, and she pricked herself again.

Each new stab raised awareness of the others. She continued down her arm from her elbow to her wrist, two for every inch—half a dozen, then a dozen, every pinhole a choice, every choice another vision. Frances with her handkerchief, crying in the hansom. Wickware shivering with terror in the garret. Mr. Fen underwater. Prick, prick, prick. The pin grew slippery from the blood she was drawing, and she pinched the metal harder till her fingertips paled. She remembered John Summer riding off to Burn. She couldn’t bear the memories of the cabin in the snow, so she turned her mind to Root. There the blood really flowed.

Tom’s broken nose and battered ribs from having saved her. The boy she’d almost killed, glowing in the storm. Abigail’s kitchen splashed with candlefruit wax.

Faster,
Molly thought.

She moved the pin up and down until the skin was fully speckled, then began her second arm.

The broken fiddle and the cannon. Tom refusing to accompany his friends to Shepherd’s Inn. The pricks were deeper now and quicker, and the pain was like a burn, and Molly concentrated hard and watched the bloody pin. She thought of her hurtfulness to Bess. Benjamin’s hand. Lem’s skull. The winterbear crunching on the dead mare’s bones.

Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas. Leaving home. Leaving home.

Blood dribbled to her hands and gathered in her palms. She cleaned them on her skirt, wiped her eyes, put away the pin, and concealed both arms underneath her cloak. The pain was like a noise she had almost ceased to hear, blaring everywhere inside her and enveloping her thoughts. She stood before the windows but she couldn’t see the water, only her reflection with the cabin light behind her. The ship was gaining speed. Had they already cleared the harbor?

She took the lantern from its hook and hurried on deck, where she handed off the light and thanked the midshipman and the captain, both of whom—especially Captain Lark—eyed her closely. Molly passed Grigory at the stern with extra haste, worried that the blood was visible upon her.

“Better now, love?” he asked.

She continued to the rail and looked toward the city. Either side of them, the land still cupped around the harbor. They were not in the open sea but there was no time to lose. It was difficult to see by the mist-shrouded moonlight; Molly scanned the water for the whitecaps and lulls, the texture and the skein of all the water far below.

“There!” she said, pointing slightly starboard into the dark.

“What?” Grigory said.

“My rescue is at hand.”

He scoffed but took a step, squinting more at her than at the place where she was pointing. She had escaped from him before and he was wary of a trick; surely Nicholas had warned him that she wasn’t to be trusted. But her smile held strong and had the hoped-for effect. His doubt began to waver. Molly focused on the wake. She needed him beside her, right against the rail.

“What are you on about?” he asked, standing at her shoulder, squinting at the harbor for whatever she had seen.

Molly’s feet were anchors. She had strength but couldn’t move. A fall would not be fatal but it was still a long way down; she wondered how fast the ship could mount a rescue. Could she do it after all? She thought of Tom, of how their limbs had interwoven in the dark. She thought of pregnancy and swelled. She was light enough to float.

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 bloodpox. 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.