Bell Weather (50 page)

“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 the 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.”

“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?”