Bell Weather (52 page)

“I should have ridden out with you,” Tom said. “We’d fought the day before and I had worries at the tavern, but it wasn’t an excuse to let you go alone. We all knew the danger and it didn’t stop Davey. It didn’t stop you.” His stomach clenched tight and bent him forward in the chair, and though he didn’t bow his head or kneel upon the floor, the whole of him was prostrate. “Forgive me,” Tom said. “I wish I’d acted different.”

Benjamin took his glasses off and placed them on the table.

“Your first concern was Molly.”

“Aye,” Tom said.

“We were foolish to ride out, only two and unprepared. I blame myself for Davey,” Benjamin said. “I couldn’t save him.”

“If three of us had gone—”

“But who can really say?”

The parlor seemed to shrink and they were close enough to whisper. Shadows in the room solidified and deepened, growing ever more substantial than the objects that cast them.

“My loss is grievous,” Benjamin said. “I forgive you all the same. Decapitation—nothing less—would sever our connection.”

He offered up the stump to shake Tom’s hand.

“Remarkable,” he said, noting his mistake. “Considering its absence dominates my thoughts, withholding it would seem the natural inclination. Yet the opposite is true. I constantly present it. Perhaps it’s similar to the intellect acknowledging some ignorance, displaying curiosity in order to advance itself. We must expose our weaknesses before we overcome them.”

“Might be habit,” Tom said.

He touched the woolen cap, feeling some of the relief of Benjamin’s forgiveness—glad, at least, the friendship had outlived the maiming—but reminded of the trials they had witnessed and endured. What had any of them gained in the balance of surviving? What would he himself present to counteract the loss?

*   *   *

Molly stood in the barn and smelled the quicksummer breeze. The sweet, capricious weather would last for several weeks and everyone had told her to enjoy it while it lasted. But the dead stayed dead. Plants that had fallen to the frost would not awaken, and the cold still lingered in the barn’s deepest nooks, in the hard-packed ground, and most of all inside her.

Bones ate a pair of bulbous apples from her hand. The crunching sound was pleasant, like a walk in heavy snow, and Molly liked the way his mouth took the fruit, spicing the enclosure with a cidery aroma. She could smell something else beneath the apples and the musk. The tavern ghost was with her.

“Gwendolyn,” she said.

Molly breathed a fragrance she remembered from the cabin: warm spring rain softening the cold. She leaned against Bones, glad of his support, until the memory of Cora seemed less another ache and more a glimmer of the quicksummer night that swirled around her. The ghost stayed beside her like a ripple in the dark, like a child needing comfort.

“Hush,” Molly said. “You can stay with me tonight.”

A gust brought a goose seed floating through the barn. Molly caught it with her fingertips—a black-and-white puff, feathery and light around a small gray seed. Ichabod was working near the barn’s front door and Molly showed him, raised the seed, and let it go upon the wind. They watched it flutter up and join with many others, sailing to the east above the moonlit trees. Molly hugged him very hard—the truest sign she knew—and left him smiling when she crossed the yard and went inside the kitchen.

Nabby rolled dough beside a row of buttered dishes.

“What are you baking?” Molly asked.

“Quicksummer pies. The ember gourds will ripen overnight in this weather.”

“What’s an ember gourd?”

Nabby gave her a hex eye for asking such a question. She often seemed convinced it had to be a joke, all the commonplace things Molly didn’t know. “You’ve seen the vines creeping on the barn’s west wall?”

“Yes,” Molly lied.

“Ember gourds,” she said. “We need to pick the fruits before they redden and combust.”

She sprinkled flour down and rolled another circle from the dough. Nabby must have made a thousand such pies during her life, and yet she didn’t look old tonight; the oversized mobcap crammed onto her head gave a transitory glimpse of Nabby as a girl.

Molly laughed. “I’ll help you pick ember gourds tomorrow.”

“Then the barn will burn to ashes.”

“Give me an hour,” Molly said. “I’ll help you then, I promise.”

She left Nabby muttering at the row of buttered dishes, walked beneath the wishbones and up the front stairs, and hesitated briefly at the door of Tom’s room.

“Come in,” he said before she knocked.

Molly went inside and closed the door behind her. Light pulsed softly from a near-dead fire, and the room smelled cold, as if the sun never touched it. Tom faced her from the middle of his threadbare rug. His hair was newly trimmed—Nabby had neatened up the back, where the flames had burned the locks—but the stubble on his jaw was two days heavy and his face looked haggard, more tired than a full night’s sleep could truly remedy. She hugged him but he didn’t hug back, not in earnest.

Beyond him out the window, goose seeds flurried in the warm dark wind, but he hadn’t raised the sash to let the quicksummer in. Molly let him go and wished she understood him—what was troubling his mind now that everything was safe?

“This used to be my parents’ room,” he said, looking around. “When I was young, six or seven, my mother let me sleep in here whenever I was scared. I used to stare at a knot in the wall. That one over there.” He pointed at the spot. “I pretended it was the world and wished that I could hold it. One morning I took a knife and tried to pry it out. My father caught me gouging at the wall. He whipped my legs for that.”

She looked to where he’d pointed, searching for the knot, but the wall was too dark for any details to show.

He sat on the bed and both of them, the bed and Tom together, sagged from overuse. Scratch, who had been hiding in a shadow near the pillow, leapt at Tom’s leg. Tom seized him by the scruff and tore him off his thigh. He held Scratch at arm’s length, murderously grim while the cat flailed and growled, and he seemed about to throw the creature into the fire when he softened, almost grinned, and placed him on the rug. Molly opened the door. Scratch bolted into the hall. She closed the door behind him and examined Tom’s leg, which was bleeding through his breeches. Tom ignored the scratches but his spirit seemed torn.

“Why did Pitt let you go?” Molly said abruptly.

Tom hesitated, blinking at the words before he said, “He’s a decent sheriff, believe it or not. He didn’t want Nicholas to take you.”

“He could have come for me himself.”

“I said decent, not competent. The man is never subtle. He’d have blundered after Nicholas and got himself shot, or let him get away, or God knows what. I trusted him to try. I didn’t trust him to succeed.”

“But you haven’t told me why—”

“In the spring,” Tom said, “once I’ve made arrangements, I’m selling him the Orange.”

He settled on the bed again. The hearth log crumbled.

“No,” Molly said. “No, you can’t. You didn’t need to!”

“It broke my heart to do it, but I did,” he said. “I needed to.”

He reached to take her hand and pull her down beside him but she walked across the room and stood before the window. The clouds were sailing lower. Wind pushed against the sash. She tried to warm her palms by putting them on the glass.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, collapsing on the inside, afraid that if she looked at him, she might collapse entirely.

“If anyone’s to blame,” he said, “it’s Nicholas and Pitt.”

“If I hadn’t run away, you wouldn’t have had to choose.”

“My father made a choice to keep the tavern when he shouldn’t have. I always used to wonder if I would have done the same. Now I know,” Tom said. “I’d like to think my mother would agree with the decision.”

“But what will you do?” Molly asked. “Where will you live? What about Bess and Ichabod and Nabby?”

“I haven’t told them yet,” he said. “It was part of the agreement that the three of them could stay, provided they decide to. There’s no forcing Nabby out, even if Pitt wanted her gone. I’d guess that Ichabod’ll stay. Bess might, too. As for me”—he drew a breath, like a long backward sigh—“I plan to build a house and maybe be a smoakcutter. I’d like the outdoor work and there’s a fortune to be made. There’s talk of opening a route past Dunderakwa Falls, shipping logs downriver to the sea at Claw Harbor. In the winter I would stay at home, keep brewing beer. There’ll be ruddy high demand if Pitt brews his own.”

She visualized a house near the smoakwood trees with their cinnamony fragrance, and the heavy black leaves, and the snows so enormous Tom would have to tunnel out or simply hunker down tight in the long winter’s grip.

“What about me?”

“Pitt would keep you on if you decided to stay,” Tom said. “He likes you.”

“I want a home of my own.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

She opened the sash and propped it with a cherrywood stick.

“The seeds are getting in,” he said.

“It’s warmer outside.”

She dropped her cloak onto the floor, along with her gown and apron, and stood in her skirts and stays in front of the inblown air, lowering her head and watching through her lashes as the seeds rushed around her, clinging to her hair. They tickled her nose and smelled like maple-sugared oatmeal. She brushed them off and crossed the room and stood in front of Tom.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m untying my stays.”

“They look tight.”

“They are. We were talking about my prospects.”

She dropped her stays and tugged her shift off her shoulders, pulling it down around her waist so it bunched below her navel.

“There are plenty of hardworking bachelors in Root,” Tom said, avoiding her eyes in favor of the more engaging view. “Men who would be eager for a spirited companion.”

“The main concern,” Molly said—she raised her skirts and straddled his lap—“is how much spirit such a man would willingly endure.”

He held her under the blooming cloud of petticoats and sighed, convincing her at last he would never let her go.

“And what would you do,” Tom asked, “with a good, durable husband?”

“I would trouble him forever.”

“Trouble I can handle.”

Molly hugged him for the heat—the breeze was not entirely warm—and buried him in hair. His stubble scraped her nipple.

“You’re smothering me,” he said, but then he hummed between her breasts and held her even tighter with a hand upon her back. Molly breathed the smoakwood aroma of the fire, which had boldly reignited with the fresh night air.

She held him by the ears. “You’ll have to push me off.”

“I’m stronger than you,” he said, muffled by her bosom.

Seeds whirled around them like feathers from a cannon.

Molly freed his face and whispered in his mouth, “We’re the strongest people in the world,” and then she put him on his back and didn’t feel cold and kissed him in the quicksummer wind, glad of home.

Acknowledgments

More than ever, love and thanks to my wife, Nicole, and our son, Jack, both of whom supported this multiyear trip to an imaginary eighteenth century. They encouraged me from the start and spent many a patient hour listening to baroque music, visiting old taverns, and hearing me talk about Molly, Tom, and Nicholas.

This book’s roots extend back to my childhood, when my parents exposed me to stories that thrilled me. Those early experiences eventually blended with my own son’s love of story, and gave me—in middle age—a jolt of youthful energy. I fear I would have shriveled up, writing increasingly anemic books, if not for the blood transfusion of fatherhood.

I wrote the first part of
Bell Weather
in the company of our cat, Max, now deceased, and the second part with our dog, Bones. I love them both. Arlen Johnson helped me road test the plot. Nathan Kotecki helped me refine an early draft. C. J. Lais gave me humbling amounts of input and opportunities to ramble, and has been the best literary wingman imaginable.

My aunt Catherine remains a paragon of auntly greatness and has more terrific anecdotes than a frontier tavern keeper.

Richard Pine believed in this book well before I finished it. Several of his clients referred to him as “kind” before I signed with him, and it’s true—he’s a gentleman of the old school and a pleasure to know. Thanks also to Eliza Rothstein, Alexis Hurley, Nathaniel Jacks, and everyone at InkWell Management.

Michael Signorelli brought gusto and vision to the editing and publishing of
Bell Weather
. His suggestions made the story leaner and stronger, and I’ve always felt the book had his heartiest devotion. I’m glad to call him a friend. Thanks also to Stella Tan, Kenn Russell, Will Staehle, Stephen Rubin, Emily Kobel, Maggie Richards, Jason Liebman, Ebony LaDelle, Carolyn O’Keefe, and everyone at Henry Holt and Company. Ellen Pyle: I salute you.

Thanks to my friends Kurtis Albright and Melissa Batalin. Kurt’s my right-hand man in lots of regular adventures and home-improvement high jinks. Melissa illustrated the astonishing maps included in this book, which are based on terribly drawn outlines I gave her. The lady is an artist.

Special thanks to all the readers and booksellers—especially Market Block Books in Troy, New York—who supported my previous novel.

Thanks to Corelli, Muffat, Handel, and Neil Gow’s dead second wife. Cheers to Pratt & Pratt Archaeological Consultants, Inc., for providing info on Hartwell Tavern in Massachusetts, which served as the basis for the Orange. Additional thanks to the anonymous author of the old sea lyric, “Oh, ’twas in the Broad Atlantic,” which I warped into Molly’s mermaid song.

If anyone wishes to blend smoak-inspired coffee, I would very much like to hear about it. You can find me online at
AuthorDennisMahoney.com
and @Giganticide. I’ll do my best to answer all emails.

About the Author