Bell Weather (24 page)

He spoke to her with cheer as if admiring her pluck, like a cook who talks to chickens soon to lose their heads. His companion stepped behind her, so close she couldn’t turn, and pulled back her arms until her shoulder blades squeezed.

“Let me go,” she said. “I haven’t got a thing for you to steal.”

“You have clothes,” her captor whispered. “You have parts like any other.”

He quickly moved in front of her, releasing one of her arms and twisting on the other. Then he grabbed her by the wrists and held them tight behind her back so they were standing, pressed together, hip to hip and eye to eye. He was shorter than the leader—roughly Molly’s height—but as solid in the middle as a well-packed barrel.

The leader stooped toward her, leaning from his mount, appearing to experience a quiver in his conscience. He stared without a word, too far away to see her clearly in the dark and yet attempting to discern something showing in her face. He approached her on the horse, staring harder as he came.

His partner shoved her down and Molly landed on her back. He straddled her and held her to the ground by her neck. The branches overhead looked infinite and crazed.

“What’ll it be?” he asked.

He drew a knife and held it by her chin. Molly bit his hand. He snarled and shook her off, and after licking at the blood and spitting in the dirt, he flipped the knife to use the bottom of the handle like a pestle.

“Smile,” he said.

She struck at him and clawed and knocked his hat behind his head. His eyes were all iris, showing nothing of the whites.

“Wait,” the leader said. He was off his horse and bending down close to see her face, and then he turned toward his horse and grabbed a length of rope.

Molly struggled even harder in the moment of distraction but the brute palmed her face, mashing in her cheeks.

The leader tossed the rope and said, “We’re taking her along.”

“You ain’t swallowing her shite about companions on the road!”

“Tie her up, you block of meat. Lickety split. You’ll thank me later.”

“Bah!” his partner said, kneeling on her gut and tying up her wrists. “I’ll have more than just your teeth before the night is done.”

He hauled her to her feet and shoved her hard against his horse. The creature snorted in alarm, as if accustomed to abuse. He pulled a sack from one of his saddlebags and yanked it over her head. The cloth smelled of onion, like the man’s own sweat. Molly tottered in her blindness, gasped for air, and stumbled forward, but he guided her foot to the stirrup and lifted her onto the horse. He climbed and sat behind her and the horse grew distressed. It was a gangly, droopy specimen and strained beneath the weight, and when the Maimer reached around her and began to tug the reins, Molly felt the tremor in the poor beast’s neck.

In spite of being tied, she could pet the horse’s mane. He calmed beneath her touch but she couldn’t calm herself. The scratchy heat of the bag was stifling, and her minutes of reprieve would only lead to worse. She thought of the stories she had heard, the fear and mutilation of the victims they’d released … What was done to those they kept? Who would know she’d disappeared?

Her day appeared in flickers like the branches of a lightning bolt. She thought of Tom’s scowl and the young boy’s frown, of Abigail’s red flush of anger in the kitchen. She had tried. She had tried and it had all led to this, and now the Maimer held the reins with his knuckles on her breasts.

“My balls are hard as fists,” he whispered in her ear.

Molly flung her head back, hard against his nose. She heard it crunch the cartilage. He groaned and pulled his hands away. The horse reared up, and when the Maimer tumbled off and thudded down behind her, Molly took the reins and galloped up the road.

She leaned down close and found the stirrups with her toes, but Molly couldn’t have slowed his panicked running if she tried. She held the reins tight and fought to keep her balance, blinded by the sack and barely in control.

Were they rushing back to Root or deeper into the woods? She heard the leader on his own strong horse in hot pursuit. The pounding of the two sets of hooves overlapped and the air pressed the sack more tightly to her face. Any moment she’d be battered by a low-slung branch. She waited for a pistol shot to hit her in the back.

She tried to shake the sack away and dizzied herself severely, and it felt as if the horse were spiraling or falling. When the sack was finally off, she saw the trees blurring past, the shrubs and obstacles and holes they miraculously cleared. The leader rode beside her, narrowing the way. Molly spurred harder but the Maimer snatched her reins and the horses slowed with a battery of hooves. Molly jumped off and landed in a bush, but after scratching up her arms in the fight against the branches, she was clear of the entanglement and running for the trees.

The Maimer caught her hair and jerked her off her feet. He stamped his boot upon her chest and held her down against the roots, forcing out her breath while he tied a longer rope around her wrists like a tether. Then he hauled her up and pulled her to the horses in the road.

She was panting and her heartbeat thumped like a rabbit, but he still hadn’t spoken, hadn’t struck her in his anger. He was stealing her, of course, and yet he treated her with care, like property he couldn’t afford to break. She had the ludicrous suspicion he was working for her father, who’d perhaps sought her out with advertised reward. But no, she thought. Impossible. Her father would have shot such mercenary men. This was something else more immediate and grim.

He forced her onto the horse without threat or explanation. It maddened her to know that he was thinking in the dark, full of judgments and ideas about her actions and appearance. Suddenly his mask looked ridiculous and cheap. He was short beside the horse, a coward in disguise. She yanked the tether from his hand, just to prove she could.

He picked the rope up and spat, yet the spitting seemed an act—a cool bit of flair to show he wasn’t irked. He wound the rope around his arm, slipped the end between the loops, formed a barrel knot and said, “Try pulling that.”

Molly looped her portion of the rope around her pommel.

“Hyah!” she said, and drove her heels.

The horse launched off. The Maimer dropped her reins but couldn’t drop the tether, and it tugged him off his feet so he was hanging by his arm. His hat blew away and he was twisting at her side. The line was short enough to keep him at the horse’s rear flank with his head at Molly’s thigh, boots dragging on the ground. He was jostled by the horse’s leg without being trampled, but the hooves were likely clipping him; his wrist was surely broken.

Out of courage or belligerence, he didn’t cry or plead. Molly almost pitied him—she didn’t want to kill him—when she scraped him past a thornbush, tearing up his coat, and whipped him with a passing branch and bounced him over rocks.

Once again she wasn’t certain which direction she was riding. Any second they could come upon the Maimer she’d unhorsed. The road was unfamiliar, all a blur of passing forest with the mists of sudden blindness and the Maimer at her side. He managed to grab her ankle and she couldn’t shake him off. The horse was tiring. The ride began to tire Molly, too, after such an endless day and such a tempest of emotion.

She squinted in the wind and fought to keep her balance. If they stopped or if the Maimer finally pulled her off the saddle, they would still be tied together with a knot she couldn’t slip. Her only option was to ride and improvise the rest.

Chapter Sixteen

Tom settled by the hearth, cozy with his pipe and savoring the best but often saddest part of the night, when all he had to do was sit and smoke alone. The last remaining patrons, seven rowdy craftsmen traveling to Grayport, had finished a late-night meal and finally settled down. Someone knocked. Tom tensed, rising quickly from his chair. Very few riders braved the road after dark, and the early-rising citizens were mostly early sleepers. Tom and Bess exchanged a look: the knock was likely trouble.

He walked to the door, expecting Sheriff Pitt or another poor soul missing a limb—which of the two he dreaded more, he almost couldn’t say—and asked who it was before unfastening the lock.

“It’s Benjamin,” he heard, muffled through the door.

Tom opened to his friend’s worry-worn face. Benjamin had run—he was strongly out of breath—and hadn’t changed his clothes since the midmorning storm. He was caked with dried mud and even his hands looked dirty: extraordinary, given the doctor’s mania for cleanliness.

“Is Molly here?” he asked.

“Why would she be here?”

“I couldn’t think of any other place she would have gone.”

“She ran off again?” Tom said. “Someone needs to hang a bell on that girl.”

Bess joined them at the door. “Molly would have come to me before she went to Tom.”

She had sniped all day, every chance she got. Earlier in the evening, Tom had almost dropped a firkin of beer and Ichabod had rushed to grab the other end. “Don’t try to
help,
” Bess had said. “You’ll be ostracized.” Tom had not responded to his cousin’s many barbs, but there were jabs and pricks aplenty in his inner conversations. His parents had rarely tossed anyone out of the tavern, and now he had thrown out the sheriff, his uncle, and Molly in the last month alone. His father would have tossed all three. Not his mother. Tom hardened at the thought of which of them he’d mirrored.

“I shouldn’t have scolded her,” he said to Bess. “I didn’t think she’d vanish.”

“It was Abby,” Benjamin said, his face a blend of pique and conjugal embarrassment. “She was holding Molly’s feet to the fire—metaphorically, of course—although our treatment of her here assuredly contributed.”

Benjamin’s use of “our” was obviously tact.

Ichabod bumbled downstairs from his room, wearing a nightcap and shift but also his boots and breeches, having gotten into bed, it seemed, and gotten back up. He must have heard the knock and looked out the window; something outside had roused him into action.

“What?” Tom said.

Someone took the ferry,
Ichabod signed.

“Who? When was this?”

Ichabod shrugged.

“Ruddy hell,” Tom said.

Bess clasped her hands. “Oh, she can’t be on the road!”

Benjamin’s complexion was a blank side of paper with his thoughts, all ascramble, being scratched inside his head. Tom closed his eyes, partly from annoyance, partly to imagine Molly entering the woods. He crossed the room and went to the closet for his rifle and his cartridge bag. The patrons quit talking and regarded him intently.

“Nothing to worry yourself about,” he said. “A woman ran away.”

One of the guests, a grimy tinker, said, “Zounds! She must be dangerous.”

They laughed and drank and talked about their girlfriends and wives, making several awful puns on pistols, cocks, and ramrods.

Ichabod ran down to the river to fetch the ferry. Tom loaded a second gun for Benjamin, who hurried out back to saddle a pair of horses, and turned toward the guests. “Bess’ll show you to your beds whenever you’re ready. You’re welcome to stay down here until I’m back.”

The table wished him luck with his runaway skirt, turning boisterous again and speaking of Bess and beds.

Tom said to Bess, “If they’re trouble, call for Nabby.”

“I can handle them,” she said, tough and supple as a switch. “Bring her back.”

“That I will.”

“I might forgive you if she’s safe.”

Bess kissed him on the cheek very hard. It hurt his gums.

He crossed the taproom into the kitchen and said to Nabby, “Keep an eye on things.”

Nabby, unfazed at his leaving with a rifle, sat spinning wool with the Book of Light beside her. She had never been known to read it but considered it a talisman, and she could quote John Lumen and the prophets word for word. Now she said above the treadle creak, “We’re running out of firewood.”

“I’m off to find Molly,” Tom said. “She left the Knoxes. Took the ferry on her own and crossed the river into the woods.”

“Then careful of the devil’s shroud and anybody crooked.”

He walked out back to meet Benjamin at the barn. The starlight was clear despite the humid warmth. His back felt firmer with the rifle at his shoulder, and the stables smelled alive, full of strong, shuffling horses. Benjamin chose a reliable gray, young but hard to spook, and Tom mounted Bones, who sensed his master’s mood and copied it at once, growing dignified but lusty, steady but electric. They cantered around the Orange, down the road toward the river.

Ichabod had rowed a small boat to the opposite shore and was already back with the stolen ferry. None of them spoke as they led the horses onto the raft and started off. Benjamin checked his pistol. Ichabod poled, walking firmly fore and aft, and Tom loaded his rifle without taking his eyes off the dark forest road.

“She said she had a brother,” Benjamin told him as they crossed. “She said that he was dead.”

“Does Abigail know?”

“Abby drew the splinter. She had picked for quite a while, opening the wound. Molly shouted it and fled in violent agitation. Abigail is utterly beside herself with guilt.”

Tom withheld his doubt of Abigail’s remorse. Benjamin apparently perceived this and sniffed.

“Pitt’ll find out,” Tom said. “Sure as sin.”

“First things first,” Benjamin replied.

His patience and diminutive stature were deceptive. Tom had known Benjamin to ride many leagues without rest, hike valleys and hills during blizzards, and brave the perils of night, storm, fire, and contagion when he needed to. The doctor wouldn’t quit until he found his missing patient. Tom considered him a brother, like his brother out at sea. How had Molly lost her own? He wondered what secrets could be dangerous enough to drive her into the godforsaken forest after dark.

They reached the bank and disembarked, and once they had led their horses to the road and mounted up, Tom said to Ichabod, “Stay until we’re back. Keep your eyes and ears sharp, and don’t go chasing after will-o’-wisps.”

Ichabod stood like a sentry on the dock. For reasons unknown, he never used a gun, but Tom had seen him knock down apples with the ferry pole. Surely he could knock an unfriendly head.