Bell Weather (16 page)

“Floria!” she said, looking past him to the water, an infinity of silver-blue mystery and depth.

“I have arranged our passage on the
Cleaver,
” Nicholas said, pointing to a merchant ship anchored offshore. It was long and double-masted with a grimy spread of sails, and the shadows made the hull look badly decomposed. “We have money enough to go. Means enough to live.”

“Father will know you’ve stolen—”

“What does it matter?” Nicholas asked. “Assuming he survives”—Molly wobbled with the trunk—“we will be hours out to sea before he notices our absence. He will first search the city. He will think we fled to Frances. If he inquires here at the harbor, he’ll be spoonfed a tale of newlyweds eloping.”

“He will know,” Molly said.

“We will need to keep our false identities in Floria, assuming he will hire men to follow and retrieve us. On the other hand, he may consider it good riddance,” Nicholas said, “and go about his business, unencumbered by our lives.”

“You cannot mean that!” she said, fearing it was true—fearing that the new world would openly embrace them.

She had dreamed of escape but not of the vastness of the sea, not of the chance, darkly dawning, that their father might be dead. She turned to look at Umber, cupping her hand against the sun. The roofs looked shorter and the buildings more provincial, more in keeping with a village than with the capital of Bruntland. Inns and taverns seemed to beckon, welcoming and snug, and carriages in motion had a fixity about them. They were landlocked, slow, could be halted, could be turned.

The boatman clapped his pipe out, eager to be off.

Nicholas handed down the trunk and said, “They’ll soon be raising anchor.”

Molly searched the streets, expecting to see their father race forth at any moment. There was little that would indicate the fury of the morning—no smoke beyond the buildings, no shots that she could hear. Even the cut above her wrist had already ceased to bleed.

She turned to face the sea and felt the city, home, Frances, all she knew and trusted glowing at her back with the warm, familiar sun. The prospect of Floria erupted into color like a painting of a fruit bowl tumbling into life—the flesh of it, the fragrances, the juices in her mouth.

“Father said the trip would kill you.”

“He believed it,” Nicholas said.

“We have money.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll keep me safe?”

“Come. The ship is leaving.”

Molly looked toward the
Cleaver,
almost laughed, almost fell. Had the pier begun to move? Was the ocean changing hues? She thought of running home and crawling into bed but then the sparkles on the water raised prickles on her skin. She would love to see a whale. She imagined being new.

“My name is Molly.”

“Mary Smith,” he said.

“Molly.”

“Molly
Smith
.”

She clenched her teeth and nodded, still Molly, still herself. Then before she weighed the danger, trusting Nicholas had done so, she climbed into the skiff, spread her arms to gain her sea legs, and marveled at the gut-deep loss of all stability.

Chapter Eleven

From the first night at sea, Nicholas was sick. His skin was yellow, green, or gray depending on the hour. Molly remained at his side in the cramped, moldy cabin, which was windowless and dim and stank of murky water. A pair of narrow cots dangled from the ceiling, so close they would have crashed if they didn’t swing in tune. Molly cried and wrung her hands, scared to shut her eyes. Between the third and fourth bells—empty clangs, tolling lonesomely forever across the water—she thought of how the land would grow increasingly remote until the continents were equally beyond them, out of reach. How the dark swirled around her while her brother moaned and slept! She listened to the creaking boards and unfamiliar voices, swaying in her cot and slowly growing tired till the night overcame her and the world disappeared.

Next morning she was bored. Nicholas vomited and dozed, occasionally mumbling. When she tried to feed him bread, he cursed and pushed her off. The stifling cabin soon reminded her of closets back at home and so she went above deck, craving open air.

The seas had risen overnight. Great waves spread around them, a landscape of broad, fluid hills. The
Cleaver
lurched forward from a trough to a peak. The bowsprit lifted and the stern swooped low, tilting Molly’s innards like water in a glass. She planted her back foot firmly on the deck and looked ahead, past the sailors watching her to see if she would fall. The sails bulged fuller, coming closer to the sky until the ship crested a wave and all the ocean lay below her. Clean spume, boiled tar, sweaty men—she breathed in the rich, foreign liveliness around her.

“Is it always so dramatic?” she asked a wall-eyed sailor trimming the mainsail.

“This is nothing,” he said, speaking, Molly thought, with an overdone snarl.

She clapped her hands and smiled.

“We’re like to see swells twice or thrice as big,” the sailor said, squinting now with menace. “They will break upon the deck with terrifying force!”

“Will they, really?” Molly asked, turning to see if any of
that
day’s waves held the promise of assault. “I assumed that many ocean tales were heightened for effect.”

“Tales!” the sailor yelled. He gripped a knot and glared at her. His wide-set eyes and broad, flattened nose gave him the appearance of a hammerhead shark. “The terrors of the deep can’t be found in tales!”

“Will we see them up close? The terrors of the deep? I’ve read of the leviathan and octopi and serpents. I would love to see the lightning or a great dirty blow.”

He blinked at her, apparently confounded by her zeal, and followed her when she walked to the rear of the ship and leaned over the taffrail.

“Careful, now!” he said.

“Have you ever seen anyone drown?”

“Aye, too many to count.”

“That’s horrible!” she said, showing enough bright excitement that the sailor seemed proud, even privileged to have witnessed such a quantity of drownings.

His name was Mr. Knacker. He’d been sailing all his life. “Born at sea,” he insisted, and she took him at his word. They continued this way for many minutes, Molly asking questions and delighting in the answers, Mr. Knacker—clearly basking in her lubberly attention—speaking, very sagely, like the saltiest of mariners. He neglected the mainsail for so long that the captain himself strode from the bow, brought Mr. Knacker to his wits again with nothing but a scowl, and looked at Molly as if he’d caught her drilling holes through the ship.

Captain Veer was rangy but immensely broad shouldered. His hair was long and black, and though his clothes were drab and functional—the same as those of the crew—he projected his command with tense contradiction: he was furious but calm, casual but grave.

“Stay in the cabin with your husband till the seas quiet down.”

She pulled the windblown hair out of her mouth and said, “I’m not afraid, sir. I’d rather stay and watch.”

Captain Veer stepped toward her as if he meant to shove her over.

“You imperil us all when you interfere with discipline,” he said. “I’ll have you carried like a sack unless you get yourself below.”

And yet he said it with respect, not at all like Mrs. Wickware threatening her with Jeremy, and she decided not to rankle him, at least not on purpose.

“Thank you for talking to me!” she called to Mr. Knacker at the mainmast.

His eyes looked to Molly and the captain simultaneously, divergent in their motions till they locked on her alone. “You’re welcome, ma’am,” he shouted with an unchecked smile. “The pleasure was mine entire!”

It was difficult to tell which of the men was more surprised: Mr. Knacker, who had praised her for distracting him from duty, or Captain Veer, who seemed to view Molly as a worker of bewitchment.

And so it went for several weeks as Molly charmed the crew and vexed Captain Veer. She was an hourly distraction with her neverending questions, an obstacle to work as she explored the
Cleaver
’s deck, and the only pair of breasts for several hundred miles. The men were impressed with Molly’s fearlessness and balance—at least a quarter of the crew had complimented her sea legs—and they enjoyed her constant awe at things they took for granted. Reef knots. Holystones. Meteors and moon dogs. The privy hole that fed directly into the sea.

This morning they had called her up to see a flock of bird crabs. These were delicacies at sea and difficult to catch, but they were drawn to passing ships and often tangled in the rigging. They were pearly gray and small, the size of Molly’s palm, with membranous wings that folded into their shells beneath the water. In flight they had the quality of pale, peculiar bats, fluttery and quick and comically erratic. Without being asked, she joined several sailors who were climbing up to catch them.

When she reached the top of the mainmast, she paused to view the ship a hundred feet below. There was no trace of land. Everything was water and the sky, with its wavy streaks of herringbone cloud, was a white-capped mirror of the ocean far below. It was blue upon blue and she was floating in the middle. There were even two suns, one real and one reflected, and the ship seemed to hover in a universal sphere.

The
Cleaver
softly rolled, the deck slipped away, and she was straight above the water, higher than the bell of Elmcross Church. Molly stretched and pulled a crab off the uppermost stay, careful of its thin but razor-sharp pincers.

“Break its wings and drop it down!” a brawny midshipman hollered from below.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said to the first, averting her eyes as she wounded it, but soon she was snapping their wings and dropping them down as if she’d done it all her life. She easily outpaced the sailor on the foremast, much to the amusement of the men upon the deck.

A crab fluttered past her hair, plucking several strands before clinging to the yardarm far to the left where Molly couldn’t reach it from the mast. It was the plumpest she had seen and couldn’t be ignored. She lay out lengthwise, straddling the yard, pretending it was nothing but a branch above a pond.

“Leave it be!” yelled a sailor underneath her at the rail, and yet he sounded halfhearted, as if he hoped to see her try.

Bellying along was awkward in her skirts. She would have hiked them up if not for all the men.

“Kraken’s balls, get down from there!” Captain Veer yelled, having emerged from his cabin to discover her aloft.

In her startlement, she snatched the crab without really looking. Its pincer caught her thumb, slicing through the nail. Molly yelped and shook it off, the crab fluttered down, and then she tumbled off the yard and dangled by her hands. Blood made her grip dangerously slick. A fat gust of wind pressed the canvas to her body, threatening to bump her through the air like a ball.

Men shouted from below with contradictory advice. Molly scowled at her hands, commanding them to hold. Her bloody palm was slipping, so she swung herself hard toward the rope that ran between the mainsail and the foremast, high to low.

For a moment she was airborne, loose above the deck—a body in the wind between the broad white sails. She hooked the tether with her elbow and clamped on tight. Once she had a grip, she crossed her ankles over the stay and shimmied down, moving backward, hanging under like a sloth until she finally reached the foremast top and landed on the platform. From there the climb was simple, little harder than a ladder, and she snatched a final crab before she jumped on deck, bloody but intact, in front of Captain Veer.

She offered him the crab. He was tauter than the rigging and refused to take the gift. His eyes were black. He stared at her with murderous composure.

“Good morning, sir,” she said.

The crew turned to wood. Captain Veer didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. The only part of him that moved was his scraggly dark hair.

“I’ll go down to the cabin where I belong,” Molly said.

Was it guilt that made her say it, or the captain’s angry silence? Either way, she felt a mutinous desire to retract it, to climb another mast and see if he would shout.

Instead she dropped the crab and watched it flutter, briefly free, before it whirled toward the sails and tangled in the lines again. She looked at every sailor as she walked to the companionway but none of them, not even Mr. Knacker, raised his face to acknowledge her in front of Captain Veer. She sucked her thumb going down—it was bleeding unabated—and the gloom below deck was dungeonlike and heavy.

There was one other paying passenger aside from Molly and her brother: a chandler, who had spent the early days of the trip nearly as seasick as Nicholas. His name was Mr. Fen and he was taking his candle-making business to Floria, where materials were cheaper and demand was on the rise. Molly guessed that he was fifty. He had a suety complexion with a faintly moistened sheen, and he paid the captain handsomely for fresh-laid eggs, which he liked to suck raw by puncturing the shells. He was not so much shy as purposefully withdrawn, keeping to his books and rarely leaving his own private cabin.

Molly had engaged him with her usual tenacity. He humored her but asked more questions than he answered. This morning he lay in a hammock with a lantern overhead. The hammock and the lantern swayed together with the ship so that the light was always falling on his favorite book of ballads.

“I’ve done it again,” she told him now, sitting on his traveling chest, and gave him an account of her adventure with the crabs.

Mr. Fen didn’t speak until she finished. He stepped out of the hammock, leaving his book behind him, and approached her with an outstretched hand.

“Let me see your thumb,” he said.

Mr. Fen examined it, holding at the joint and squinting at the crab-cut nail. He guided her off the chest, opened the lid, and pulled out a tiny bottle of spirits.

“Be brave and this will cleanse it,” he said, addressing her, she felt, the way he might address a toddler. Molly looked away, determined not to wince. He popped the cork and poured. It felt like boiling water. Mr. Fen watched her face instead of her injured thumb. She ground her other hand’s knuckles on the corner of the chest, diverting her attention till the sting began to fade. He corked the bottle, blew gently on her thumb to dry it off, and wrapped the wound neatly with a small strip of cloth.