Bell Weather (31 page)

Pitt nodded at his shoes as if this, exactly this, was what he expected from the Orange, and Tom himself couldn’t help regarding his property as a place where, yes, shit like this and people like his uncle were bound to appear.

Lem clomped away; drunk or not, it was the only way the man ever walked. Pitt wiped his feet in the grass, rather too close to the door, and left Tom alone as rain began to fall, drenching and warm and somehow stagnant in the dark.

Folks,
Tom thought, recalling Pitt’s word.

It was Abigail still, slipping thoughts in people’s heads. She had publicly supported Bess’s moving in, but for Tom to harbor Molly was something else entirely, despite the fact that she herself and Benjamin had done so. She had questioned every traveler she met throughout the summer, pointing Molly out whenever she could and mentioning “the dead brother,” never suspecting that Tom knew more than he admitted and was already making his own quiet inquiries to travelers.

The rain stopped as briskly as it had come. Instead of freshening him up, it had spattered mud on his stockings and left him with the steaming, clingy weight of sodden clothes. The tavern stood before him, its stone foundation muddied like his legs, its clapboards deeply weathered by a thousand other rainfalls. To the right of where he stood, the storeroom and secondary bedrooms—an addition to the original building, one that predated even his parents’ ownership of the tavern—made an L-shaped enclosure in a portion of the yard. It was cozy and secluded, and it recalled him to his childhood and other rainy nights when he used to help his father with the horses in the stables.

So many memories of his father had an element of dark: a reassuring figure in the brightness of a door, a shadow in the barn, a body on the floor. After carrying the straw and mucking out the stalls, Tom would run toward the lantern in the kitchen—this very kitchen, with the very same lantern—and forget to take his shoes off. He remembered how his mother’s laugh lines sagged in disappointment when she turned to find him sullying her newly swept floor, and how she met him in the light, and lectured him again, but handed him a fresh-baked cracknell all the same.

He tasted caraway seeds and smelled the flour on her apron. This was home and there was more to it than licenses and sentiment. His father had died for it and his brother had abandoned it, but his mother had lived for the Orange and given it to Tom, and neither governor nor grief would take it from his hands.

Chapter Twenty

Later that night, after everyone had gone, Molly found Tom alone in the taproom. He sat at a table near the window and watched a shower of rain. A lone, stumpy candle in the middle of the room was scarcely bright enough to qualify as illumination, and the saturated heat was like the air beneath a blanket.

“How’s Bess?” he asked.

“Sleeping,” Molly said.

So were Ichabod and Nabby and the handful of travelers. She flapped the front of her gown to ventilate her breasts and grazed her left nipple. That was all it took to overwhelm her senses and she wobbled off center, like a pudding set aquiver. It astonished her to be so affected. After last winter, she’d believed the urge had died but here it was, resurrected like an everlasting body.

Molly stood beside Tom with her belly near his ear. She reached toward his tied-back hair without his noticing.

“Why was she talking to Lucas?” he asked.

“She’s been saving her money for fiddle lessons.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I’m teasing you,” she said, and then she did grab his ponytail, squeezing it and giving it the gentlest of tugs. “She fancies him.”

“I didn’t know that, either,” Tom said without turning.

Molly released his hair, disappointed that her boldness hadn’t prompted a reaction.

“I reckon Lem scared him off,” Tom said.

“Then he wasn’t much of a man.”

“Most men have the sense to keep clear of a woman with that much trouble clinging to her skirts.”

“Not you.”

“It’s one of my reckless virtues,” Tom said, looking up at her with nothing like virtue in his eyes, as if her skirts, then and there, were smoldering off her body. Molly drew a chair and sat beside him, knee to thigh.

“What will you do about Bess and Lem?”

Tom sighed. “There isn’t much I can do. I won’t send her off, but neither will I fight him outright unless I have to. They’re all the family I got, at least around here.”

“Your brother at sea—”

“Winward,” Tom said, smiling just to say it. “People call him Win. He was smart enough to leave and not look back.”

“Don’t you love Root?”

“I do. I love the Orange. There’s a history to home, but every history has hurts. Ever seen the gash on the outside door?”

Molly nodded. She had probed it with her finger only last week.

“That’s a hatchet cut,” he said. “I could show you seven bullet holes peppering the walls. Bloodstains from accidents and childbirth and fights. A quarter of the tavern caught fire one year. You can still see the burns on the underlying frame.”

She knew the scorched wood, a few of the bullet holes, and many of the stains, some of which she’d made with her own spilled blood. She knew the black glove nailed to the parlor wall and the sinister face lurking in the hearth stones. She also knew the exact number of wishbones hanging in the taproom, the hidden panel in the upstairs hall, and the cobwebbed passage that led to the secret part of the cellar. She didn’t know most of the stories behind the details, and considering how often she discovered something new—a roughly carved symbol, or the window outside that didn’t correspond to any known room—it seemed the Orange had the history of many homes combined.

Tom fell as silent as the furniture around them.

“How did your parents die?” she asked.

“You don’t know this yet?”

There were countless questions Molly had withheld throughout the summer, especially those related to her regular companions. She knew nothing about Ichabod’s muteness, little of Benjamin and Abigail’s past, and almost none of Tom’s life aside from what she saw directly. Having secrets of her own made her hesitant to ask.

“You know about the war,” Tom said.

Molly nodded. She knew it verse and chorus from the papers back in Umber, when she used to study the articles for news about her father.

Tom looked out the window instead of at her, giving an oddly distant feel to everything he told her.

“I served for three years in the army and wound up at Fort Pine,” he said. “That’s fifty leagues north of here, mostly wilderness except for the odd settlement or two. The Rouge had found a passage from the sea to the northern Antler. They meant to run ships from the mountains to the Arrowhead River, straight down to Grayport—it would have won the war. We were a skeleton division holding Fort Pine, barely enough to man the cannons. Our captain had died of knotgut, our food and ammunition were low, and the Kraw had hemmed us in so we couldn’t send for reinforcements. We knew the Rouge were coming, and we knew General Bell and his men were only a two-day march to the west, completely unaware—”

Molly bumped his leg, rising from her chair. She had mostly held her breath since he mentioned Fort Pine, but on hearing her father’s name, she walked toward the bar to gather her composure.

“What?” Tom asked.

“I thought you’d like a drink,” she said, thankful of the dark.

Of course the bar was locked. She walked back to get his key and he was sitting there, perplexed, seeming worried he had rambled and annoyed that she was up.

“I want to hear it all and mean to settle in,” she said.

Molly took the key and unlocked the bar. Tom waited, silhouetted by a quick flash of lightning while she poured them each a rum, drank her own, and poured again. The heat felt thicker at the level of her head. She took the glasses back and sat. Her legs were made of wax.

“You needed reinforcements but the Kraw had hemmed you in,” she said. “What are they like?”

“The Kraw?” he asked, holding his rum and leaning away from her exaggerated interest. “Hard,” he said. “Sharp. Like a thicket made of knives. The warriors are women.”

“People say they aren’t human.”

“They’re human,” Tom said. “I admit to having wondered. The Elkinaki say the Kraw are so connected to the forest, they sicken when they leave it, like uprooted trees.”

Tom took a drink and swished before he swallowed.

“They were all around the fort, and fearsome good at hiding. A man could try to run and get a message through to Bell, but even with sharpshooters clearing the way, it was more than likely suicide. A week before the siege, I’d gotten word my mother had died of fever. My father was already dead, and there had been rumors that my brother’s ship had sunk at Point Dureef. I suppose I fell victim to despair,” Tom said. “But it felt like rage. I hated the Rouge for starting the war. I hated the Kraw for pinning us in. I hated General Bell for camping so close and not knowing how desperate we had gotten at the fort. I put it all on him. I wanted him to know.

“I left at first light, before the sun was rightly up. There was a secret way out, a hidden door that got me into shrubs around the fort. The forest smelled rank and overgrown, like a poison. All I meant to do was run until I died. I took off straight toward the tree line, sprinting through the clearing with a knife and two pistols. The Kraw appeared out of nowhere, shadows in the shadows. I shot the first, missed the second, dropped the guns, and ran as fast as I could. An arrow hit my leg. I broke it off with the point still buried in my thigh. A few of them chased me. They were silent—it was eerie how they moved. Sharpshooters hit them from the fort and cleared the way, but one of the shooters wasn’t so sharp and hit
me
in the shoulder, right before I made it to the trees. The bullet spun me and I landed in a patch of high ferns, with the Kraw it should have killed coming right behind me.

“The fall dazed me and she caught me—I must have looked dead. I didn’t see her but I smelled her, and the strange thing about it was she smelled like home. Exactly like this,” Tom said, putting his palms upon the table, close to Molly’s own. “Smoky and familiar. I imagined I was here. I felt her leaning over me and thought about my mother. Then she tried to scalp me—sliced a quarter way back before I stabbed her in the gut. I didn’t feel her knife until her body fell away.”

He tipped his forehead down for Molly to examine. She ran her fingers over the scar, slightly crooked, slightly raised, and moved the skin upon the bone with a fascinated shiver. She wondered if he’d ever let another person touch it.

“Did you feel your own skull?”

“I don’t remember,” Tom said.

He traced the scar with his thumb, with his elbows on the table and a thin line of sweat running from his temple.

“I left the fort ready to die,” he said. “The pain changed my mind. So off I went with a bullet in my shoulder, an arrowhead buried in my leg, and so much blood in my face I couldn’t wipe it off. I heard another round of shots—a few more Kraw the sharpshooters hit—and then I was clear of the worst and running in the forest. Eventually I stopped and tore my sleeves to make a bandage so my scalp wouldn’t keep flapping open as I ran. When I made it to Bell’s encampment, I wouldn’t drink or sit until I delivered the message in person. I met the general in a tent, gave him the letter, and collapsed. I gathered he was powerfully impressed by my arrival.”

Tom gulped his rum so unslakably and firmly, he seemed prepared to swallow the glass or crush it in his hand. He stood and opened a window. Fresher, cooler air wafted in and gave them breath. Molly watched him sit again. His weight creaked the chair. She could still feel his scar like blisters on her fingers.

“I slept for three days and woke to news that General Bell had marched to Fort Pine,” he said. “The Rouge sailed down, expecting no resistance, and were blown to smithereens. It turned the war in Bruntland’s favor. Bell visited me later and gave me a commendation.”

“What did you think of him?” she asked.

“An angry man. Rigid. Like he wasn’t used to anything but standing up straight. He admired my wounds. He even touched my scalp the way you touched my scar. We shared a bottle of port and talked about the war, but something in his being there, something in his crispness or his confidence enraged me. I tried to disillusion him. I talked about my mother, how I’d left the fort assuming, even wishing, I’d be killed. I thought he’d be disgusted and consider it unsoldierly. But then he talked about his wife, who had died giving birth, and his son and daughter, who were waiting back in Umber.”

“What did he say?” Molly whispered.

“He said he hoped his own death would inspire them to greatness—only nothing quite as bloody. We toasted to their health.”

Tom fell into a reverie, accompanied it seemed by the spirit of his mother, and the voice of General Bell, and the old glass of port. In the hour when her father had been toasting to her health, she’d been reveling with Nicholas and toasting their ascension. Was it possible the same was happening again—that her father, worlds away, was thinking of her now, never dreaming what fates he had driven her and Nicholas to follow?

“After the war,” Tom said, “people saw me different. They asked for my advice, came to me for help. They put me at the head of Root’s militia. More than a few suggested I run for office. And it burned James Pitt, who’d joined another regiment and served without injury or recognition. No fault of his own. He’d been willing to fight. The war played out a different way, that was all, and he marched back home the same as when he left.”

“It’s small of him to hate you for it,” Molly said.

“He hated me before. The war deepened the trench.”

He stood again, fetched the tobacco rope hanging near the hearth, and laid it on the table. She watched him cut coin-sized disks off the rope and dice them very finely with his knife while he spoke.

“Pitt’s father used to own this place when we were boys,” Tom said. “Our mothers were friends. They knew each other in Grayport before the Pitts moved here and built the tavern for their home and livelihood. There was need of a tavern here, but Mr. Pitt had made his money in shipping and didn’t know a lick about brewing. He had contempt for most of the locals, too, which didn’t help business, and a run of bad luck. Part of the roof collapsed one winter. The storeroom burned. He fell into debt, was facing jail and worse from some of his creditors, so he took their savings back to Grayport and gambled on a high-risk shipment overseas, right as the Rouge and pirates started playing havoc with the trade routes. Even if the shipment got through, he needed half a year to see a big enough return.”