Bell Weather (19 page)

Molly’s spirit fell as swiftly. She worried for the sailors who were bound to stay on deck—friends of hers and kindly men, minnows in the storm.

“Be safe,” she said to Captain Veer.

She kissed him on the cheek. He softened like chocolate held briefly in her hand. Molly left before he spoke and saw the crew stifling laughs. It warmed her for a moment—Mr. Knacker winked hello—but then the spume smelled icy and the ship sank low and she imagined being drowned in the everlasting cold.

She collected two coils of rope from Mr. McGiverns and started below to get some food, but then a thought rippled up, causing her to stop: Mr. Fen unaccounted for and Nicholas alone. The pistol wasn’t loaded. She’d been gone too long.

She hurried back and Mr. Fen was reading in his hammock. He looked at her and smiled with malevolent success. Molly felt her stomach falling through her bladder when she left him there and rushed down the passage to her cabin. A wave struck the ship and rocked it far to starboard. Molly hit the wall and landed on the floor.

She crawled toward her brother’s cot, unable to see his face until she kneeled up beside him. Nicholas was sleeping with the pistol at his side. She laughed and kissed his hand, tied him down with half the rope, and made herself secure within her own swaying cot. The ship’s chaotic motion steadily intensified and Molly lay awake, and listened to the storm, and worriedly obsessed over Mr. Fen’s smile.

*   *   *

There were times she felt the ship had rolled upon its side, or underneath the water like a small wooden bubble. Lightning cracked, terrible as fractures in the hull—she couldn’t see it but she smelled it, caustic and electric—and now and then her arm hairs tingled at the tips. Waves boomed from all directions. Molly gripped the rope that held her in the cot and tried to pray, using prayers she invented on the spot. Closing her eyes made the nauseating movement more pronounced, and the unrelenting storm began to wear her out. Eventually she slept. She dreamed of swirling darkness.

When she woke and looked around, Nicholas was gone. His safety rope dangled from the cot. She fought her own wet rope; the knot was tied correctly but refused to come loose. She tried to see if Nicholas was lying on the floor; half a foot of water sloshed against the wall.

Finally the rope came free and Molly stood. The water chilled her feet, cold as winter rain, and then a wave hit the
Cleaver
and the ship fell aslant. Molly slipped back, grabbing at the air, and struck herself senseless on a beam of solid oak.

Later, coming to, she remembered having fallen. She could not remember getting up and climbing into her cot. She was shivering and soaked but safe beneath her blanket with the rope she had loosened re-secured around her body.

Had the storm begun to weaken? She was swaying less dramatically. Her skull ached dully and her thoughts wouldn’t stick, and looking around the room left her dizzy and depleted. There was Nicholas, however, safe within his cot again, motionless and quiet but observing her attentively.

“How?” Molly wondered, but she couldn’t form the word and went to sleep again, falling into fathomless relief.

*   *   *

“Mrs. Smith,” came a voice.

Someone shook her arm—Mr. Knacker at her side. He wore a cloth around his forehead, pink with rainy blood, and held a lantern up to see her.

“There you are. Up and at ’em.”

“Nicholas,” she murmured.

“Beg pardon?” Mr. Knacker asked.

She realized she had used her brother’s real name, but before she had a chance to remedy the slip, Nicholas himself answered from the corner. He was sitting on the trunk, leg crossed above his knee, more alert than she had seen him since they left Umber Harbor.

“Nicholas was her childhood friend,” he said to Mr. Knacker. “You were dreaming, my dear,” he told her with a smile.

“Jacob,” Molly said, straining at her rope.

Mr. Knacker freed the knot and helped her sit forward. Her vertigo returned and the cabin seemed to warp. Blood pounded in her temples and her stomach felt wrung, but after several slow breaths, the symptoms went away and Molly focused on her brother, comforted but dazed.

He looked like a boy freshly risen from a nap. His head was high. His eyes were warm. His face was calm and supple. Only now did Molly recognize the quiet of the cabin. Gone were the shrieking winds and urgent hollers of the crew. The ship, still ascending and descending with the waves, had a trustworthy rhythm and a balance in its rolls.

“The storm…,” she began.

“Did its worst,” said Mr. Knacker. “We were beat to pulp and splinters but the captain fought us through.”

“Your head,” she said.

“’Twas nothing but free-swinging tackle.” With the rag around the wound and his eyes so askew, he seemed to be a man long familiar with concussions. “Quite a few of us was battered, though. Mr. Darn has a bone jutting from his thigh, Mr. Shivers got his foot crushed flatter than a sheet, and poor McGiverns slipped off the mainmast and landed on his noggin. He’s been knocked out solid with a dent ever since.”

“How awful!” Molly said. Only yesterday McGiverns had provided her with rope and he had smiled at her and told her not to worry, not a jot.

“What’s more,” said Mr. Knacker, lowering the lantern, “Mr. Fen has disappeared.”

Molly gasped and looked at Nicholas. The lantern swung light over his face and made him younger, swung away and left him shadowy and old, unfamiliar.

“We’ve searched from top to bottom, stem to stern,” said Mr. Knacker. “He must have ventured up and fallen overboard. The captain’s all a fury, raging to and fro. The two of you was right to stay in your cots.” He slumped and shook his head, bulging out his eyes. “What on earth possessed him? God be with him in the deep.”

He pondered so long, Molly worried that he was addled, that the tackle had perhaps hurt him more than he believed. She refused to let him leave until he showed Nicholas his head.

“My husband studied medicine, enough to be a doctor.”

Nicholas examined him. The lump was not severe. Molly tore a strip from the bottom of her blanket to replace the sodden bandage. Mr. Knacker grew teary—from the pain or Molly’s care?—and didn’t go until he had thanked her twice and sung her praise to Nicholas, declaring her a wife to make any husband proud.

“I see that you have made your usual impression,” Nicholas said when he was gone.

“But what of Mr. Fen?”

Molly stood and crossed the room, closing up her cloak against the cold northern air.

“Perhaps he felt shame,” Nicholas suggested. “Shame for what he was and fear of being caught. It’s possible he threw himself over in despair.”

“No,” Molly said. She could almost see her breath. “He wasn’t afraid. He was smiling when I saw him.”

“When?” Nicholas asked.

“Just before the storm. He was smiling in his hammock as if he knew something wicked. I was scared he might have smothered you. What else could he have done?”

Nicholas considered this, at first as if to humor her but crystallizing, slowly, like a window growing ice. He stood abruptly. Molly’s heart jumped backward in her chest. He turned toward the trunk, opened the lid, and dumped it out, and then he sifted through the extra clothes, shaking every article.

“The money bag,” he said, and hurried out the door.

Molly followed up the passageway to Mr. Fen’s cabin, where he ransacked the travel chest and blankets in the hammock. He examined every corner, every nook and board until he finally slumped down, grimly stunned, against the wall.

“He took it,” Molly said. “Everything we had!”

“To the bottom of the sea,” Nicholas replied.

“Maybe he’s alive and hiding in the hold.”

Her brother shook his head with dreadful resignation, losing his complexion like a man spilling blood. Molly clutched the hammock for support and almost fell.

“Nicholas,” she said. “Oh, Nicholas, what have you done?”

The ship carried on, pitching forward down a wave. In the air, she could feel their destination fast approaching—the sting of autumn, even winter, in a land full of strangers.

“Nicholas,” she said, but he was distant. He was gone.

Chapter Thirteen

T
OWN OF
R
OOT,
C
ONTINENT OF
F
LORIA,
1763

Root burgeoned with fertility, surging back to life far more emphatically than other parts of Floria. Spring greened the town and brought better air—cool and minty in the shade, wholesome in the light—and the forest grew thicker after every burst of rain. The Antler River had receded, the flowers of the flood had drifted southward over the falls, and all around town people tidied up their homes, painting and repairing after winter’s abuse.

Tom Orange swung his ax and split a log behind the tavern, where the garden was erupting with its pumpkin vines, bean sprouts, and panoply of herbs. His ribs had mostly healed and his bruises had diminished after the rescue in the river. He was active dawn to midnight, spirited and strong, busy as the song bees that looped around his head. These were bees that buzzed in melody to harmonize the hive. The songs were quick and simple like the music of the birds, but though a single bee was charming, and the hive all together made a gorgeous humming choir, three or four around his ears buzzing different tunes—in and out, in and out—were maddeningly noisy.

Tom swung his ax again, trying to ignore them. He was boiling wort for beer and needed more wood, but as so often happened at the critical stage of brewing, multiple distractions endangered his efforts. A song bee dove and crawled inside his hair, just as Ichabod gangled out to summon him inside and the ax blade jammed in a hard black knot. The bee was under his ponytail, tickling Tom’s neck. He freed the ax, looked up, and said, “What?”

The voiceless Ichabod had lived in the Orange for so many years that his expressions and hand signs were comprehensible to Tom, except in certain instances of odd specificity. He gestured, “Come inside, someone is here,” with perfect clarity but indicated trouble with his tall, knitted brow.

From the road around front came the sound of cheerful voices.

“Travelers,” Tom said, surprised he hadn’t noticed sooner.

But Ichabod responded yes, and no, and both together till his head began to swivel. Tom swatted at his ponytail but couldn’t find the bee. He second-guessed how much sassafras and withered monk he’d already added to the hops, and he was about to check the angle of the sun—he kept track of the boiling time by instinct and slow-moving shadow—when Ichabod loped across the garden, picked a berry from a bush, and dotted it repeatedly on his forehead and cheeks.

He stood before Tom with his red-speckled face.

“Lem,” Tom said.

Ichabod nodded.

Steam billowed from the pot and almost scalded Tom’s chin. He backed away, clapped his neck, and caught the bee beneath his hair. It stung his palm twice but he didn’t let go; if only he had hands big enough for Lem. Other bees surrounded him, apparently aware their compatriot was trapped, and buzzing something different now: a choral song of battle.

“Where’s Bess?” Tom asked.

Ichabod pointed up, his finger ringed with bees, wincing as he did so and eager to escape.

Tom gauged the simmer of the wort by its burble. He had fifteen minutes, maybe less, till he strained it. Too soon or too late and it was hardly worth keeping. Ichabod was dutiful but couldn’t read the boil. There was no good choice but to hurry inside and so he strode toward the door, letting go of the bee and leaving half his mind swirling in the belly of the copper.

He entered through the kitchen. Nabby chopped chickens, setting aside the beaks for talismanic garlands. She was short and had the spongy-firm skin of dried apples. No one knew her age; she’d been old when Tom was young. She spent every day of the year baking bread and pies, cooking meat, tending the hearth, and speaking of ghosts and omens as matter-of-factly as other people gossiped. Now she chewed a slice of liver, her infallible means of testing a bird’s acceptability, and frowned as if to say, “I
know
a group has come.”

Tom picked a stinger from his palm and fixed his hair. “Lem’s here again.”

“I have a nose,” Nabby said.

Indeed, the nourishing smell of the kitchen had succumbed to Lem’s stink, one of carcasses and flesh and foul, bubbling dyes. A smoaknut of tension grew in Tom’s chest, very like the bullet lodged in his shoulder. He left Nabby with her beaks and walked up front.

The taproom was cozy-dim even in the daylight, its furniture and floor weathered smooth by decades of visitors, browned by dirt and polish, spill and wipe, smoke and time. Tom could almost stand straight inside the unlit hearth; one of its stones was like a face, another like a wolf. Windows at the front overlooked the road, with the town down left and the river down right. The room was big enough for fourscore people, tightly packed, and smelled of fire and tobacco, travelers’ sweat and rum—an odor so familiar it was virtually his own. He knew the table nicks, the rafter cracks, the stains and warps and creaky chairs as thoroughly as any of the marks upon his body. However full of strangers, it would always be his home.

What to make of Uncle Lem: relative or stranger? He was muscular and tall, with receding, stringy hair. He stood in the middle of the taproom, blood-browned apron tied around his waist, bearing so little resemblance to his sister—Tom’s diminutive mother, now deceased—that an unknowing eye would never have spotted their relation.

Tom approached him as a small group of travelers entered in the front. Before a word was spoken, Lem crossed the room and clomped aggressively to Ichabod, who’d followed through the kitchen with the berry-juice dots still covering his face. Ichabod flinched and cracked his elbow on the doorframe.

Tom caught his uncle by the arm, using all his strength just to slow him down. Lem turned and the window light clearly showed his face. His cheeks and forehead were mottled, like most of his skin, with small crimson freckles: the permanent marks of bloodpox. The marks were exceedingly rare—few people who caught the sickness during the last serious outbreak had lived; it had killed Lem’s wife and nearly killed him—and they were generally less pronounced even among survivors.