Bell Weather (8 page)

“This is Tremendous,” Molly said.

“I dare say it is!” Graves answered.

Bell approached him to apologize—and drag away his daughter—but he couldn’t find a way around the great wall of horse.

“I was riding with my eyes closed,” Molly told the general.

“With your
eyes
closed. Remarkable,” Graves said. “That has to be a four-foot wall.”

“Five,” Molly said. “He didn’t even clip it!”

The two of them continued this way for several minutes, even when the horse urinated freely, splattering the tiles with his great black penis. The smell was overpowering, the flow a minor river. Bell stood bristling through the whole conversation, staring at his daughter as his blood pressure rose but failing to communicate his violent displeasure.

“The question now is how to get him out,” Graves said, openly delighted by the strangeness of the problem.

“If we get a running start from the far end of the room,” Molly said, “or better still the hall—”

“The staff will handle the horse,” Bell said.

“Ah, there you are, Bell,” Graves said, acting like he truly had misplaced him. “Your daughter here is quite the flash of fire,” he continued, winking at Molly as if he had just met his eighteenth grandchild.

“General Graves,” Bell said, going so far as to seize the man’s arm and lead him to the door. “I must insist that we continue in the study.”

“I sincerely hope you’ll join us,” Graves said to Molly.

“She will not—”

“Of course she will,” Graves decided, chuckling now at Bell’s apparent temper. “I should like to hear your feelings on the troubles in Floria,” he said to Molly, who at least had the sense to look at her father for permission. It was not directly granted.

“But we can’t leave Tremendous here alone,” Molly said.

“Perhaps you would escort me to the study,” Graves said, “while your father and the staff see about your horse.”

*   *   *

“Father sat and listened for an hour,” Nicholas said, “while the two of you talked about horses?”

“General Graves asked him questions now and then,” Molly said. “We also talked about Floria and ocean travel.”

“And then the general left?”

“It wasn’t that abrupt.”

“It must have seemed so to Father. He’s been waiting all week to chew the general’s ear.”

“It’s true,” Frances said, sitting in a rocking chair and sewing silver buttons onto a shirt. “I found him in the night, quarter past three, poring over maps and planning what to say. ‘I have it,’ he said as I was bringing him a sherry. Said the whole war was plain as day, plain as day. He acted right certain that the general would agree.”

“Instead he spent an hour listening to Molly,” Nicholas said, bottling his mirth until his eyes began to pool. He had color in his cheeks, a flush that even the sun, searing every day throughout the hot Bruntish summer, had failed to raise as fully as his sister’s wondrous story. “What happened to Tremendous?”

“Burke and Stevens led him out.”

“How?” Frances asked. “The conservatory leads—”

“Directly to the hall,” Nicholas said. “And from the hall they must have led him—”

“Through the study.” Molly laughed. “The three of us were sitting there, talking over biscuits, when they opened up the door and walked him past the table.”

Frances clapped her mouth, rigid at the thought. Nicholas erupted and his laughter—boyish and ebullient, so at odds with his cadaverous demeanor—tickled Frances’s nerves and set her laughing just as fully. It was worth every penalty their father would decree to hear them both laughing like a pair of giddy children.

“Your poor father,” Frances finally said, sweating from the unaccustomed fun at his expense.

“Bah,” Nicholas said. “He hoped to make an impression. What more could he ask?”

The trio laughed again, louder than before, with the humid little drawing room cushioning the sound. Molly knelt to lay her head upon her governess’s lap.

“Mind the needle,” Frances said.

Nicholas grew preoccupied, losing all his jollity. Molly wondered at her brother’s studious expression.

“Will he still go abroad?” she asked.

“Yes,” Nicholas said.

“And we’ll be rulers of the house.”

“
I
will be the ruler of the house,” Frances answered. “I hope you treat me kinder than you treat your father.”

“We’ll treat you like our mother,” Nicholas said.

Frances held her breath and put the needle in her cushion. Molly looked at her, assuming she was basking in the sentiment, but Frances and her brother turned their heads toward the door. There were footsteps steadily approaching in the hall, the claps so sharp Molly wondered if Tremendous might have somehow found his way back inside the house.

Her father opened the door.

“Get off the floor,” he said to Molly. “Frances, you may go.”

Molly wobbled when she stood; the sudden rise swirled her head. She had hurried from the study when her father walked outside to see the general into his carriage, and she had done her best—successfully till now—to drive away the fear of what would happen to her horse.

“It wasn’t Tremendous’s fault,” she said, wishing that her voice were not so childishly high. “You always say the rider is to blame if there’s an accident. I was reckless, it was me. I will write to General Graves, apologizing—”

“No,” Bell said, with something like a smirk. He smiled so rarely, the expression was difficult to read and so it scared her, as thoroughly as Nicholas’s laughter had enchanted her.

Bell stepped aside to let Frances out. She slipped around him with a nod. He was curiously blank, refusing to acknowledge the governess but almost, with a lowering of his chin, seeming drained when she was gone and he had shut the door behind her.

Nicholas stood without a sound, eyes fixed upon their father.

“As it happens,” Bell began, “General Graves thinks highly of my powers of authority. Give us a thousand soldiers like your daughter, he said, and the continent is ours. He was jesting, of course, and yet he trusts in my ability to lead, to build a regiment as spirited and strong as I have built our little family. If your intention was to drive him off and keep me safe at home, I am afraid that you have failed.”

“You have your command,” Nicholas said.

“I do,” Bell replied. “But here I am, preparing to go, and how can I leave you here alone, leaping horses into rooms and God knows what?”

Molly breathed deeply, trying to enlarge herself. “I promise to behave as long as you’re away. You can trust me.”

“I most certainly cannot.” Bell laughed but it sounded more contemptuous than mirthful. “You would turn the whole house into a wild gypsy carnival.”

“I will govern Molly,” Nicholas said.

Bell regarded him and sighed with wary, chilled respect. “You have always had a will and I have always had to guide it. I have half a mind to take you overseas when I embark.”

Nicholas blanched even whiter than his ordinary pallor.

Bell rubbed his jaw and seemed to honestly consider it. At last he shook his head and said, “Your health is unreliable. The trip alone would kill you. I am forced to leave you here, not quite a man and not quite a boy. You lack the sure-footed wisdom to run a household, and your lenience with Molly is a long-abiding weakness. The two of you together … no, it simply won’t do.”

“Frances…,” Molly said, as if her father had forgotten.

Nicholas, however, saw the danger in an instant. “No,” he said, stepping up firmly to their father, one hand limp, the other fisted at his side.

“In recent weeks,” Bell said, “as I anticipated my departure, I thought a great deal of Frances’s ensconcement, shall we say, and of the virtues of her character. Devotion. Predictability. Familiarity. She is popular with the staff, respected and obeyed.”

“Loved,” Molly said.

“Yes, loved,” Bell agreed. “But like a child on a stallion, she is far too apt to let the reins slip away. I have hired a new governess, Mrs. Wickware, who brings a sterling reputation and extensive experience—”

“You can’t,” Molly said, gasping through her tears.

“It is done,” her father answered. “I will speak to Frances now, before we travel back to the city, giving her time to make arrangements and—”

“You’re sending her away?” Nicholas said.

“I must.”

Molly marveled at her brother’s instantaneous composure.

“You require someone stronger,” Nicholas conceded. “With Mrs. Wickware in charge, Frances might remain and fill another position.”

“Impossible,” their father said. “She is, as you have noted, much beloved by the staff. In matters of debate, they would defer to her rather than to Mrs. Wickware. A house cannot be governed in a state of ambiguity, any more than Floria can bow to two crowns. But you need not worry over Frances. I have found her an excellent position in Crookbury. As I said, I am not unappreciative—”

“You are a fiend,” Nicholas said.

“How dare you!”

“No, you can’t!” Molly yelled. “You can’t, it isn’t fair!”

“It is necessary,” Bell declared, ignoring Molly’s sobs and staring with ferocity at Nicholas, father and son nose to nose and locked as if their gazes were hypnotic, even fatal.

“She’s like our mother,” Molly said.

“But she is not!” Bell erupted. “Your mother died fourteen years ago.”

“So did you,” Nicholas said.

Bell struck him backhand, cutting his cheek with a ring and knocking him down with fearful ease. Molly ran to hold him, Nicholas hugged her back, and they protected each other in a knot of hands and elbows. Bell loomed above them, his gleaming boot tainted with the horse’s stale urine and his nostrils flaring open, audible and vulgar.

“I hate you,” Molly said. “You’re awful, I despise you.”

Bell was startled by her vehemence and backed toward the door. The frame boxed him in, both confining and enlarging him. “If your defiance has resulted from an overwarm attachment to your governess,” he said with overwrought composure, “I am required to warn Frances’s new employers, who have children of their own and may object—”

“No,” Molly said, clenching up tight. “No, it’s us. Only us.”

“Very well,” Bell said.

Nicholas remained silent, his face so immobile as to resemble the plaster death masks he’d studied as a child, causing Bell to shiver as he pivoted, exited the room, and left his son and daughter huddled on the floor.

*   *   *

Molly appealed to her father incessantly. She waylaid him on the stairs, and in the stables, and at the end of each day in his private room where he was bound to return, exhausted and irritable, to face yet another of her heartfelt pleas. His usual response being silence or avoidance, she resorted to flagrant disobedience—refusing to pack for their journey back to the city, failing to change her clothes or tidy her hair, and most of all knocking, and calling, and singing childish songs whenever she encountered a locked room and knew that he was just beyond the door.

It was no use. Lord Bell put her off without acknowledgment or rage, ordering servants to pack her bags as she pursued him through the house, until she finally despaired and ceased to badger him completely, spending all the time she could in the company of Frances.

Nicholas appealed to the staff, taking his time with each and wringing their hearts with recollections of Frances’s qualities—her kindness, her reliability, and her advocacy, at one time or another, on every servant’s behalf—to rally their support. Lord Bell was unaccustomed to revolt; perhaps great dissent would force him to reconsider, if only to ensure law and order in the home. But Nicholas’s words had the opposite effect, reminding everyone from the grooms to the maids that even a woman as peerless as Frances wasn’t guaranteed the favor of their master. The servants doubled their efforts to appease Lord Bell and keep themselves secure, leaving Nicholas and Molly unsupported in rebellion.

Frances took the news with remarkable aplomb. According to Newton the footman, who overheard the conversation, she remained completely silent as Bell explained the reason for her dismissal. Instead of panicking or pleading, Frances overcame her shock and then replied, softly balanced, that of course she understood: whatever was best for the family. Newton watched her leave the study, dry-eyed and poised, but she kept to her room for much of the following day, refusing meals and denying access even to Molly and Nicholas when they knocked. She revealed herself after dinner the next night, sitting in the drawing room for her customary hour with the siblings. She slumped as if a structure in her body had collapsed. Her skin was wan from hunger, her eyes were dark and raw, and although she smiled and insisted she would weather the ordeal, the draining of her spirit seemed to indicate a fate much graver than dismissal, like an illness that would steadily disintegrate her bones.

She held herself together until the morning of her departure, when the siblings carried her bags to meet the carriage that would take her out of their lives. Lord Bell had said goodbye inside the manor and had given her a gift—a silver brooch once belonging to his wife—and after the carriage had been loaded and Frances faced the siblings in her drab ruffled cap, she crumpled into tears and they were quick to hold her up.

“You can’t leave!” Molly cried, burying her face in Frances’s armpit and squeezing around her ribs.

Nicholas stood on the opposite side, appearing to hug them both but insinuating his arm, like a pry bar, to loosen his sister’s too-tight embrace.

“Molly, look at me,” he said when she had finally raised her head.

He was calm but not unfeeling, clamping his emotions.

“I won’t be calm, I won’t accept it,” Molly said. “I’ll run away!”

“No,” Frances told her, speaking with such severity that Molly felt slapped. “The thought of you alone—”

“But together,” Nicholas said, and then to Molly, “Still together. You will not run away, because you wouldn’t have me. And you won’t worry Frances. And we haven’t seen the end of this.”

Frances nodded in approval, though the end had clearly come.

Molly hated her brother’s voice and rational control, and she almost hated Frances for the brooch she’d accepted—such a trifle, after years of mothering and work. The carriage driver, Stevens, sat above them on the box and him alone Molly loved, for his patience in the heat, for how his thick black beard indicated strength. Stevens, at least, wouldn’t hurry Frances off.