Bell Weather (21 page)

One night the previous week, Benjamin had hummed a piece to himself and Molly had exclaimed, “That’s Flumat!”

Benjamin, much surprised, had double-checked the sheet.

“It is. It is indeed!” he said. “But how is it familiar?”

Molly almost blurted she had learned it from her brother, but she pinched herself fiercely on the wrist and said, “I have a memory for music. Like remembering a dream.”

He waited patiently for more, reading her expression like an unknown cadenza, and the floor appeared to shrink and draw their chairs nearer together. But on that particular evening, his wish to know her secrets paled before his delight at finding a companion, unheard-of in Root, who was acquainted with the music ever playing in his mind. From that night forth, they had spoken of Brondel, Hark, Riber, Frederini, and Gorelli, often reading the sheets together until Molly—much to Abigail’s displeasure—started to hum throughout the day as absentmindedly as Benjamin.

Neither of the Knoxes, Molly knew, believed her memory loss was genuine. Benjamin didn’t press, or rather pressed with gracious care. Abigail, however, came at her with knives.

Just that morning over breakfast, Molly was finishing her eggs when Abigail said, “I have another, if you’re hungry.”

“No, but thank you, Mrs. Knox.”

“A wasted egg. If you are finished with your breakfast, you may help me beat the rugs.”

“I continue to prescribe no strenuous activity after meals,” Benjamin said from behind a month-old newspaper he had borrowed from the tavern.

Abigail pursed her skinny lips—she seemed, in fact, to purse her whole body—and said as she cleared the table, “You encouraged Sarah Crook to go about her work,” referring to an elderly widow who had recently been kicked unconscious by a horse.

“A man in Grayport has invented an optical device,” Benjamin read, “that detects nascent fevers.”

“An honesty device would prove more useful,” Abigail replied.

Molly did her best to finish up her eggs. The hard-boiled yolk clung drily at her windpipe.

Benjamin folded the paper and stared at the wall, seeming to consider the materials of fever glasses. “There are numerous diverse manifestations of mental darkness,” he began.

“Including voluntary,” Abigail said, and promptly left the room.

Molly drank tea and dislodged the egg.

“I am crippling stalkers today,” Benjamin told her with a smile. “Would you like to assist me?”

“Yes,” she said, standing up and looking to the garden.

“She can cripple stalkers but cannot beat a rug,” came Abigail’s voice from two rooms away.

Indeed, Molly did feel strong enough to work when she was asked, or at the very least recovered from her most dramatic symptoms—the tenderness, swelling, and after-bleeding of her pregnancy, which she had struggled to conceal from Benjamin and Abigail. The air today soothed her like a childhood bath. Birds familiar and exotic swooped past, flashing colors: goldfinches, cardinals, something pearl, something blue. She pressed her hands into the earth, enjoying the fatness of the worms and the feel of healthy soil, and yet an emptiness remained, a hollowness of body and of life altogether, as if she had possessed a sixth sense and now, having lost it, found her customary senses too predictable and drab.

She captured the last of the runaway stalkers and watched Benjamin cripple and replant them. The weeds were calmer now, defeated—deprived, like herself, of their ability to flee, but at any rate safe within the good doctor’s care.

“They will root themselves again and grow more docile,” Benjamin said as he tamped the soil with his palms, “so long as they are kept sufficiently moist.”

“The rain will help,” Molly said.

Benjamin stood and cupped his eyes against the daylight. The sky looked enormous: high blue, bright as life, without a single passing cloud or any trace of wind. He tilted his head and asked, “Why do you say it will rain?”

“The blades of grass look sharper and they’re leaning to the west,” Molly said. “I noticed it a week ago, just before a storm.”

“Yes!” Benjamin said, clapping his hands and almost jigging. He rushed her with ebullience, eyeglasses flashing in the sun. “I have noted it a hundred times. The grass begins to point, the leaves raise their palms, and the white-throated sparrows sing a full octave higher.”

Molly had failed to note the sparrows but believed it was true. She had seen her fill of marvels since journeying to Floria, and even in a country so oddly unfamiliar, Root seemed a brighter cornucopia of wonders. Flower floods, walking weeds, multicolored air—of
course
the grass and birds heralded the storms.

“Does no one else notice?” Molly asked.

“The pointing grass?”

“The rarity and queerness.”

“Rare and queer! So it is! Most of the townspeople were born here and know of little else. That which travelers and transplants look upon as curious, the locals see as common as the hairs within their nostrils.”

“Are you a transplant?” she asked.

“I was born and breeched in Grayport.”

“Why is Root … different?”

“Why, indeed?” Benjamin replied. “I have notes and observations, legends and accounts, theories geographic, biologic, astronomic. Nowhere else, save perhaps the sea, are the mysteries of nature so abundantly in evidence, to say nothing of our more supernatural phenomena. The presence of ghosts is broadly accepted, and the local Elkinaki tell of a figure in the forest—the Colorless Man—who is strikingly similar to the devil of Scripture. Many in Root claim to have seen him as a thin, crooked shadow in the trees, in their dreams, or at the ends of their own benighted beds. Their stories are amazingly consistent, but how does one substantiate the wholly insubstantial?”

“Why are you whispering?” Molly asked.

“Abigail’s hearing is acute,” Benjamin said, leaning closer. “She tolerates my inquisitiveness to a degree, but she is devoutly Lumenist and considers my probing into spiritual matters prideful, even insolent to God.”

“But do you believe in such things? Ghosts and crooked shadow men?”

“Truth often hides within a skein of superstition. Nabby, the cook at the Orange, is a fount of numinous wisdom and is, herself, almost supernaturally long-lived … But that reminds me! The nyx is efflorescing.” Benjamin crossed the garden to a blossoming purple shrub. He cut a sprig with his knife and held it up to show her. “Nabby insists the petals, rubbed upon her eyelids, allow her to discover witches in disguise. It flowers only for a day—even now, the bloom is fading. I must take it to her at once or she will grouse at me the whole year through,” he said with a smile. “I think you may accompany me today. You have been cooped up enough and must be curious to see beyond the window of the parlor.”

“Yes!” Molly said, precisely as a leaden cloud, a forerunner of the approaching storm, dimmed the glaring sun.

She hadn’t seen Tom since his one brief visit to the house, but even three weeks later, he seemed to her as present as he had been that morning in the river when she floated in his arms, buoyant with his warmth. He was busy at the tavern, Benjamin had told her. She worried that he remembered her as cold, dead weight. But, oh!—how she would like to speak with him again, and to find in him, perhaps, another kind friend.

Abigail walked out the back door carrying Benjamin’s medical bag and said, “You’re wanted at the smithy. Luger crushed his foot.”

She had tied her hair back strictly so her forehead stretched, heightening her eyebrows. It gave her a look of supercilious attentiveness, recalling Mrs. Wickware, and yet her heron’s neck and poise were reminiscent of Frances, instilling in Molly a dual urge to hug her and recoil.

Benjamin took his bag and left for the smithy at once, his ruminative mood giving way to action, and after he was gone Abigail said to Molly, “There are several more stalkers mangling the pepperstem. I trust that you can cripple them yourself unassisted. When you’re finished, you may come inside and help me boil linen.”

She went inside without waiting for an answer, and Molly turned to the pepperstem, where three more stalkers had indeed been overlooked. It took her five minutes to extricate and replant them, and then she noticed the sprig of nyx that Benjamin had left behind, its small purple blossoms looking duller than before. She picked the flowers up and ran around the front of the house, but Benjamin had taken his horse and ridden out of sight.

Wind gusted up Center Street, swirling petticoats and dust, and there was thunder in the west and a smell of scoured tin. Gray-green clouds darkened and descended. The tavern stood in the distance on its hillock near the river. She could make it there and back in very little time; why not go alone? She wasn’t a prisoner, after all. Yet she doubted Abigail would allow her to leave instead of boiling linen, so she ran down the street without bothering to ask, hoping to deliver the nyx, say hello to Tom, and hurry back to the house before her absence was discovered.

She passed the common where the cows chewed the moist new grass. Next came the meetinghouse, bone white and fronted by a steeple, rarely used for several years—so Abigail had told her—since the local minister had been eaten by a catamount. A confidential air deepened off the common, partly from the overarching trees along the street but largely from the neatness and compactness of the houses. Most were single story, with a sharp peaked attic—a partial second level where inhabitants would sleep. All were simple in design, with pairs of windows at the front, central chimneys, white clapboards, and variously colored trim—crimson, green, indigo, buttercream, black.

However similar in style, they had character from age and many features of disfigurement. A window cloaked in ivy leaves fluttering with birds. A mangled weathervane, its arrow pointing up as if to blame. One small house, immaculately clean, had settled at an angle and tilted to the left, enough so that a ball might roll across its floor. Another, lacking shade, looked permanently parched. Still another looked warped from a lifetime of rain. Molly tried to imagine the differences inside—how it felt to look out instead of looking in.

Wind blew her east, down the street toward the river. Branches swayed and lightning flickered in the storm-heavy dark. Every citizen in sight was hurrying indoors and no one paid attention as she sprinted past, feeling weightless with the gusts shoving at her back.

She reached the end of Center Street and looked across the river, where the vast eastern forest seemed to spread out forever. Lightning lit the water and the woods stark white. Thunder cracked close, sounding like a pistol shot. She smelled the burnt powder, felt the tremor up her arm—only memories, but strong enough to make her think of Nicholas.

Ice-sharp rain needled at her face, and the wind bent the trees and whitecapped the river. She ran against the gusts, up a slope and sopping wet. She couldn’t see a thing through the broad sheets of rain. Hail fell in bursts, coating patches of the ground and pinging off her forehead and cleavage, hard as glass. It annihilated the sprig of nyx—nothing remained except for the stems—and Molly wiped her face and tried to see the tavern. A broad fork of lightning fractured overhead. She saw an old wooden sign swinging off a post: a faded orange, stuck with cloves. Beyond it, glowing windows.

Then a woman ran toward her from behind, drenched and laughing. She was young and unafraid and splashing up mud, a pretty silhouette emerging from the storm.

“Come on!” the woman said.

Molly took her hand. They hiked their skirts, ran beneath a sycamore tree, and raced toward the tavern’s storm-flickered door.

Chapter Fourteen

The young woman kept Molly’s hand and pulled her up the stairs inside the tavern’s front door, looking backward with a fling of wet brown hair and laughing as if the storm was the best kind of fun. Molly glimpsed the taproom’s lantern-lit chairs and followed her up, into the darkened staircase, down the second-story hall, and into a tiny room.

The woman closed the door. She passed the rain-lashed window overlooking Root and lit a candle with a tinderbox. The room glowed alive. The walls were pale, creamy green and decorated with a dozen dried bouquets. Atop a tidy chest of drawers lay a hairbrush, a hand mirror, and a picture book of Rougian dresses. Molly sneezed and dripped water on the threadbare rug.

“I’m Bess,” the woman said with candlelit eyes. She popped off her shoes and dropped her garters and her stockings. “And you,” she said, “are Molly. I saw you when they pulled you from the river. Tom’s my cousin. I’ve wanted to meet you since he saved you but it’s work, work, work, clean this and carry that. Tom is always seven places in his head and not a one of them is fun. Not to call it fun—the danger you were in—but oh, I’m glad to meet you! Were you really almost dead?”

Molly backed against the door, overwhelmed and yet delighted by the breathless introduction. They were of equal height and weight, similarly aged. Molly had darker hair and whiter skin—Bess looked permanently sun-kissed—and yet they resembled each other enough, even in their contrasts, to make them like the subjects of the same bold painter.

Bess continued shedding clothes with sisterly immodesty, too diverted by her own flying thoughts to wait for answers. “You truly don’t remember where you came from?” she asked, stepping out of her sodden skirts. “What were you doing in the river? Maybe you were poisoned! Isn’t it maddening and thrilling? You could be anyone, after all.” Bess removed her stays and stood in nothing but her shift. It showed her body, pretty and lean with dimpled knees and tiny breasts. “It’s like misplacing a favorite locket and retracing where you’ve been, except you can’t remember where you’ve been and the locket is really yourself.”

She hung her clothes to drip in front of the unlit hearth, then tugged a sheet off her bed and handed a corner to Molly so the two could dry their hair beneath the canopy of linen. Then she handed off the sheet and said, “I need to change my shift.”

Here she finally paused and waited for Molly to turn. Molly averted her eyes but there was something—Bess’s reticence? her jittery tapping foot?—that made her sneak a look when Bess dropped her shift. Her naked ribs and spine wavered with the candle. She had welts across her back, not quite scars and not quite fresh. Hail beat the roof and skittered down the shingles. Rain lashed the glass. Molly squeezed the locket at her chest and looked away.