Bell Weather (3 page)

“Tom is always welcome,” Benjamin said to Pitt, sounding as if the tension were a slight misunderstanding. He was a short and slender man of thirty-nine years, gentle as a fawn, gray in every hair, delicate of movement and possessing a voice best suited to a bedside. A calm exterior disguised his boundless energy and thought.

“Furthermore,” Benjamin continued, “I invited Tom myself, and as the doctor of my patient and the head of the household”—Abigail raised her eyebrows—“I assure you that his presence is not primarily social, nor secondarily a matter of good form, given that he saved her, but rather tertiarily—or chiefly, I should say—a stroke of opportunity in both of our endeavors.”

Pitt stood inert.

“What?” Tom said.

“Meet Molly,” Benjamin told him, standing aside so Tom could see her.

She sat in bed with her legs beneath a quilt, supported by pillows, clean and alert and remarkably intact. Tom had a high opinion of his friend’s abilities—Benjamin had treated nearly everyone in town at one time or another, and commonly saved his patients’ lives in all but the most egregious cases—but Molly’s good condition bordered on miraculous.

She was pretty in a weird, rather homely sort of way. Her hair was long and black, partly matted, partly tousled. She had slightly gapped teeth. Her eyes were out of alignment, one noticeably higher, and rounder, and darker than the other, so she looked half grieved, half luminous with wonder. Her expression, most engagingly, was volatile and ripe, as if she wanted to embrace him, fall to tears, or both at once.

It was strange to meet her again surrounded by the others, to be watched so intently while they shared a private look, one as wordless and profound as when he had held her in the water.

“Thank you,” Molly said.

“It’s good to see you dry.”

She smiled with a twitch and rubbed her fingers on the quilt.

“You recognize Tom?” Abigail asked.

“Yes,” Molly said.

“Excellent!” Benjamin cried without actually raising his voice. He turned to Tom and said, “I hoped if she remembered you, we might construct a memory bridge and cross the floodwaters, so to speak, to other recollections of her history and identity.”

“You don’t remember what happened?” Tom asked.

“She doesn’t remember anything,” Abigail said curtly, “aside from you and her name.”

“Molly,” Tom said, just to try it out.

She stared at him and froze as if afraid he didn’t trust her.

“And what is your last name again?” Abigail asked. “It’s hard to keep it pinned.”

“Smith,” Molly mumbled.

“Yes,
Smith.
And yet I’m sure you gave a different name the first time we asked.”

“We’ve covered that,” Pitt said, clinging to the fact, regardless of its truth, and glowering at Tom as if his visit were undoing even this one precarious clue.

The room was close and humid after the quick dose of rain. There was moisture on the window glass and sweat in Tom’s clothes, and since it wasn’t truly warm, it lingered like a fever chill, shallowing his breath and clouding up his thoughts. Molly touched a locket on a ribbon around her neck. He thought to ask her what it was—it might remind her of her past—but she hid it, growing flushed, when she saw what he was thinking.

“You don’t remember anything at all?” Tom asked.

“Now and then,” Abigail said, “she can’t remember how to answer when she’s spoken to.”

“Enough, enough,” Benjamin said, reassuring Molly with a light, avuncular pat. “I have been explaining to Abigail and Sheriff Pitt,” he told Tom, “that certain traumas, such as drowning, knocks about the head, unconsciousness, exhaustion, and extremity of fear, to say nothing of certain phases of the moon, noxious plants, chronic malnutrition, and diseases of the brain—though I am confident in laying most of these aside—have been known to produce severe but often temporary amnesia. If we take into consideration—”

“Tom was knocked about the head,” Abigail noted. “I believe he still remembers
his
last name.”

Benjamin considered this but quickly disregarded it. “Now that Tom is here,” he said, looking down at Molly, “does seeing him ignite a spark of recollection of the hours or the minutes that preceded your arrival? Perhaps by training your memory directly on the branch—”

Molly fidgeted discreetly, meeting Benjamin’s look as if the memories might be there, written in the features of her doctor’s kindly face.

“Describe your house,” Pitt said, seeming to think authority was all they really needed. “Did you have your own room? A family or a husband?”

Molly sighed until she shrank and didn’t breathe back in, looking down so her hair fell loose around her cheeks.

“Why don’t you try something else?” Tom told Pitt.

“Like what?”

“Get on your horse and ask around. The Antler flows south, so chances are you ought to ride north. That’s your left-hand side if you look toward the sun, but here’s the complicated part: when the sun is going down—”

“I won’t put up with this.”

“You’ve already asked your questions,” Tom said. “What are you still doing here?”

“What about you?” Pitt said, stepping forward. “All fopped up like a proper macaroni. Are you trying to impress the young lady, or puff your reputation so you sell more cider?”

“Mind your tongues,” Abigail said, “or both of you can leave.”

Tom unclenched his fists, aware, on loosening up, of how much pain he’d caused his sprained wrist. Pitt stood his ground, breathing boldly through his nose, as if he might arrest Tom for contempt of civic office.

“I apologize, Abigail,” Tom said at last, feeling something like a rum burn rising in his chest. “But we ought to spread a net wider than the room.”

Pitt crossed his arms. “Now apologize to me.”

“I only want to help.”

“Like your father?” Pitt replied.

It was all Tom could do not to throw him out the window.

“Root’s hero has a deep black stain upon his name,” Pitt said, speaking to Molly without the courtesy of facing her. “You might consider the facts of
his
storied past—”

“I don’t care!” Molly said. “He saved my life. Let him be.”

Pitt was startled to have pricked Molly’s nerve instead of Tom’s. She shivered under the quilt and seemed about to swoon, lapsing forward on the bed and covering her face. She cried into her hands, surprising them anew.

Benjamin consoled her with a hand upon her back and looked to Abigail, speaking with the courteous authority of doctors. “Please show them out.”

Neither man objected. Pitt left first, neither frowning at nor bumping into Tom when he passed. After Pitt and Abigail were gone, Tom took a final look at Molly—the poor thing had crumpled into sobs—and Benjamin said, “Wait for me downstairs.”

Tom nodded and turned to go, relieved to hear the front door close behind Pitt but hollow, almost glum, to leave Molly there in tears. He met Abigail in the foyer. She gave him an unspoken censure for his part in the commotion and retired to the kitchen. Tom refused to pace but his thoughts roamed far, first to Pitt as a child, then to both their dead fathers, then to Molly’s rush of color when she spoke in Tom’s defense.

Benjamin joined him downstairs and led him outside. Abigail’s hearing was alarmingly acute, and even on the street they kept their voices lowered.

“What do you know?” Tom asked.

“The brain is a fabulous organ,” Benjamin said, “as capable of silence as of melody and storm. Oftentimes the lulls are more dramatic than the notes.”

Tom paused as if to demonstrate his own dramatic lull, and after waiting a respectable length of time he asked again, “What do you know?”

Benjamin blinked behind his glasses, returning from abstraction to the muddy terra firma. “More than Pitt,” he said. “Abigail is right: Molly remembers more than she admits, and I have gleaned several facts she believes are safely hidden. First and foremost—”

Benjamin’s eyes were drawn away with an illuminated thrill.

“An upfall!” he said.

Tom looked to see the tall, swirling columns in the east. They were droplets being drawn from the river to the sky—upside-down rain resulting in a cloud that would swell until it drifted off, pregnant as a storm.

“There was a colorwash right before I got here,” Tom said.

“I saw, I saw, but those are common. This is something else, something wonderful and rare. The flood,” Benjamin said, grasping Tom’s arm. “Is it rising or receding?”

“Going down,” Tom said. “It was minor this year, barely crested—”

“The last recorded upfall was 1756, when the Antler swamped the creek and took the millwheel away. And now the Planter’s Moon is Saturday night, and feel the eastern wind! Every weathercock turned! I dare say the river hasn’t finished with its swell.”

Benjamin checked his pocketwatch and memorized the time. Later he would note it in a thick black ledger, along with the temperature, barometric pressure, angle of the grass, and numerous other observations he was certain would lead to his ultimate deciphering of Root’s climatological marvels. Tom was skeptical but smiled at his friend’s high excitement. Before they could speak of it further, a red-haired boy sprinted up the road, splashing puddles on the way with devilish abandon.

It was Peter Ames, the youngest son of William the cabinetmaker, and he ran so fast toward Benjamin and Tom they had to catch him by the elbows before he skidded past.

“Easy,” Tom said.

Peter slipped and fell. He stood without embarrassment and said with gleeful fear, “The Maimers is back! Another victim’s just come; they took him to the Orange.”

Benjamin slumped but steeled himself, sad and resolute. Tom hardened with a scowl, putting a hand too firmly on Peter’s shoulder and frightening the boy with his expression.

“You’re sure it’s Maimers?”

Peter sniffed and nodded, scared of saying more.

Abigail appeared at the door with Benjamin’s medical bag, her preternatural hearing having caught the brief exchange. She gave it to her husband, cast a disapproving look at Peter’s clothes, and said to Tom, “You were right.”

He took no more pleasure from her words than Abigail took in speaking them, and said again to Peter, “Are you sure—”

“Robbed and naked as the rest,” the boy said. “He just come out of the woods and Fanny Buckman set to screaming. Mr. Ichabod and Bess took him inside, and Nabby said run to the doctor’s, find Tom, bring ’em back straightaway. He’s bleeding awful bad. The Maimers took his tongue!”

Chapter Three

Tom entered the Orange and bounded up the stairs between the taproom and the parlor, both of which looked empty at a glance, and squinted in the darkness after so much sun. He pressed past his ancient cook, Nabby, who knelt below the landing with a bucket and rags, wiping blood off the steps and angry with him now, not only for his pell-mell approach but for sloshing her water, bumping her head, and tracking mud where she had cleaned the minute before he came.

“And break my neck while you’re at it,” Nabby said, “and then you’ll have a broke-neck cook and a poor tongueless wretch and I should like to see you keep an orderly tavern after that.”

Nabby hated leaving the kitchen in the rear of the tavern without serious reason, but Tom knew her well enough to sense her irritation came from more than her abandonment of vittles at the hearth. She was shaken by the Maimers, and the victim, and the blood, and she was angry at herself for being so affected.

“The child is vexed. You know she fears blood,” Nabby said, referring to the tavern ghost, a girl who remembered little of her earthly life except for a mother who had loved her, killed her, or possibly both. Nameless and invisible, she had lived in the Orange for a decade, and Nabby alone claimed to understand the knocks, creaks, and ethereal odors with which the ghost communicated. Tom could feel her now: a troubling air more like memory than ordinary sense, a fragrance in his thoughts that reminded him of loss.

Benjamin walked up behind them, stepping gracefully around Nabby and her bucket. He and Tom entered an upstairs room at the side of the tavern—dark and unfurnished but for a bed—that was usually reserved for vagabonds or prisoners. It was dim and low-ceilinged, and the window had bars. Tom’s cousin Bess rushed to meet them at the door. She was twenty and petite, her honey-brown hair stuffed inside a cap, and he tensed to see her apron and her hands smeared with blood. Her eyes were wide and teary but she held herself straight.

“Excuse me, Bess,” Benjamin said, passing through directly to the victim on the bed.

“Are you all right?” Tom asked his cousin.

Bess nodded unconvincingly. The smell of blood and herbs mingled with her warmth. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Go and clean yourself up.”

She set her feet and wiped her fingers on her apron. “I can stay.”

“There’s nothing you can do now that Benjamin’s here. I need you downstairs—”

Contradicting him at once, Benjamin said from the back of the room, “Bess, my dear—I need a fresh pair of rags, absolutely clean. Boil them first, lift them with a clean-boiled fork, and hold them out to cool in the breeze. Do not touch them with your hands.” It was a point he always stressed—cleanliness, cleanliness—and although he was often mocked for such a curious insistence, people humored him, encouraged by his regular success. “Also ice,” Benjamin said, “and a bowl of moistened raspberry leaves, softly crushed.”

She ran downstairs and Tom entered the room, just as Ichabod—unnoticed until that moment—opened the shutters to illuminate the victim on the bed.

The man looked drained of all his fluids, his complexion gray-green from the blood he must have swallowed. Bess had cleaned his chin but his neck was sticky dark. He had arrived completely naked and been dressed in a set of Tom’s old clothes, which were long and ill-fitting. Ichabod held a basin under his mouth, allowing him to murmur out another pitiful flow. He looked from Benjamin to Tom with large blue eyes and seemed aghast that he could neither apologize for the mess nor offer a description of his terrible ordeal.