Bell Weather (33 page)

He was middle-aged. His wig was triply curled on either side. He was nervously delighted, like a child with a present, and he shook her hand emphatically and spoke for all to hear.

“How wonderful to see you! I haven’t returned to Grayport in more than a year. I’ve only come to Root to buy a bag of smoak—a yearly sojourn, a pleasurable trip before the cold. I moved to Liberty, remember. But of course you do!” he said, his face a summer day of bonhomie and wealth. “My
venture
has been utterly successful,” he continued, loading “venture” up with meaning she could scarcely comprehend. “Utterly, euphorically successful, through and through. I owe your husband a marvelous debt, one I am delighted to—”

“I have no husband,” Molly said, aware of some attention from the crowd, including Bess. “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. I’m afraid we haven’t met.”

“Oh, I see. Perfect strangers, then,” Mr. Bole replied, giving her a wink that made his crow’s feet smile. “But what are you doing here in Root?”

The militia thronged up around the table full of tankards, and the demand was so great that Bess continued pouring, even as she listened in with breathy fascination.

“I told you, you’re mistaken,” Molly said to Mr. Bole.

He turned sly and put a finger to his nose. “Please forgive me. I mistook you for a woman I knew in Grayport.”

She frowned at him and whispered in his ear, “Go away.”

Mr. Bole appeared wounded and surprised but then retreated, shuffling off to buy his sack of fresh-roasted smoak.

“Who was
that
?” Bess asked.

“No one. Just a traveler,” Molly said. “Someone drunk.”

“He didn’t seem—”

“Ruddy fucking hell,” Tom said behind them, raspy from a day’s worth of hollering commands. His rifle’s bayonet jabbed above his shoulder, and the muscles in his neck looked firm enough to strum. “I ain’t paying you to talk,” he said, walking to the table.

“What
are
you paying ’em for?” asked a farmer with a grin.

“I’m pouring quick as I can,” Bess told Tom. “I won’t pour quicker just because you’re scowling.”

“I ain’t scowling.”

“You are,” Bess said. “It makes you special handsome. Ain’t my cousin handsome?”

A militiawoman clapped Tom’s back. “He’s a keeper.”

“Lousy captain, though,” someone else mumbled in the crowd. “No wonder we were told to show up late.”

Whoever said it didn’t show himself but hurried out of sight. Several troops drinking cider traded shifty looks, as if they knew a bit more and didn’t want to say.

Molly watched Tom. He seemed, as he considered what he’d heard and what it meant, to reenact the whole disastrous muster in his mind. He upended his rifle and stabbed the bayonet into the ground. Then he removed his hat and coat and hung them on the stock, and laid his ammo bag, powder horn, and knife at Molly’s feet. Divested of his uniform and weapon, he seemed less a captain, more an ordinary man. Her nerves began to settle until he smiled at her and said, “I’m going to beat the sheriff to a red bubbling mash.”

He laughed as if he’d bottled one laugh for many years and all the waiting had fermented it into something black and poisonous.

“Stop,” she said. “Don’t. Come inside and have a drink.”

Tom began to walk, heedless of her plea.

“I won’t let you do this,” she said, and blocked his way.

“I’ve told you more than once,” Tom said. “Learn your place.”

“Or what? You’ll send me off?”

He put his hands around her ribs and said, “I’ll chuck you back in the river.” Then he picked her up, turned, and set her to the side.

“Oh!” Molly said, mad enough to spit.

She let him go and briefly hoped he’d get himself arrested. An evening in the stocks was just what he deserved—she’d be first in line to bounce a rotten apple off his head. Then she thought about the tavern license Pitt could try to revoke. Molly tiptoed high to look around the crowd for Benjamin—only he could possibly defuse Tom’s temper—but she didn’t see either of the Knoxes on the grounds.

She was forced toward the tavern by the last swell of troops, a dusty brown gang of younger, rowdier men who laughed and pushed and looked prepared to tap their own keg. Benjamin wasn’t in the taproom. Molly hurried through to the kitchen, where Nabby denied seeing him and upbraided her for gallivanting around instead of working.

“It’s urgent,” Molly said.

“Is someone dying?”

“No, but Tom—”

“The rabble wants drinks, and who is helping Ichabod? You’ve left him on his own,” Nabby said, “to your shame.”

She tried corralling Molly with a whisk of seasoned hazelrod, but Molly escaped to the yard and ran to the side of the tavern, racing around the storeroom and past the broken cannon, where she squinted through the smoak-roast haze and scanned the crowd again.

Pitt’s scarlet coat finally caught her eye. He was thirty paces off near the tavern’s front door and looking down toward the road with a concentrated smirk. Molly followed his gaze. There was Tom, marching up. He was headed straight for Pitt and undeterred by the bustle. Nothing but a miracle would halt him in his course.

Molly found tongs among the smoak-roast tools. She stooped and took a small burning coal from the pit, holding back her skirts so they wouldn’t catch fire. The smoke stung her eyes but kept her well concealed, and she returned to the cannon at a sprint, double-checked that nobody had seen her, and verified the slightly upward angle of the barrel. The shot would clear the river and continue to the forest. No one would be hurt—although she worried about the deer—and so she stood beside the cannon, as far away as she could get, and held the tongs above the touch hole. The coal lit the fuse.

A thundercloud of smoke, stabbing fire, and an earthquake. She fell and clutched her heart, deaf and badly dazed, and thought the barrel had exploded. It was gone, completely gone. All that stood before her was the empty, fractured carriage. How was she alive?

She saw the wall and understood.

*   *   *

Tom heaved another pail of water onto the cannon barrel and touched the iron with his palm, relieved to find it cool but still not trusting it completely. The blast had thrown it backward off its carriage into the storeroom; there had been no fire, but even so the damage was shocking. The hole was a maw of jagged clapboards, and one of the studs had fractured and been thrown in lethal pieces twenty feet back against the room’s inner wall. The barrel had shattered several crates and lay at an angle amid the pulverized jars of pickled pigs’ feet and snouts. Ichabod entered with another full pail and poured it into the barrel. Something sizzled deep inside. Tom stepped back and looked toward the hole. It afforded a view of the river, radiant and pure, which made the gloomy, acrid wreckage look all the more severe.

Now that they had driven away the gawkers and the Muster Day crowd was starting to disperse, Tom had left Bess in the taproom with a handful of trustworthy militiamen—hard to come by today—to mind the tavern while he, Nabby, and Ichabod surveyed the damage. Molly, God damn her, was conspicuously missing.

Tom heard a scraping from the corner. He dragged a crate aside and Scratch leapt out, growling, with a pig snout clamped in his jaws. A splinter from the blast protruded from his flank. He was damp with blood and vinegar and rippling with emotion. Tom reached toward him, hoping to pull the splinter. Scratch jumped away, giving Ichabod a fright when he darted outside with his hard-won snout.

Tom shook his head. “Ruddy fucking devil.”

Pitt crunched in, seemingly on cue. Benjamin and Abigail followed close behind. They stood inside the door just off the kitchen, looking at the cannon barrel lying in the rubble.

“These were in the grass beside the carriage,” Pitt said.

He held up a pair of wrought-iron tongs.

“Who would do such a thing and promptly disappear?” Abigail asked, sounding as if the answer were a foregone conclusion. She stepped beside Pitt, leaving little room for Benjamin, who tilted his head to see above her shoulder and offered Tom an apologetic look.

“It could have been anyone,” Tom said.

Pitt clipped the air with the tongs and asked, “What was a loaded cannon doing there at all?”

“We moved it out of harm’s way.”

“Evidently not.”

“I’d like to know who sabotaged the carriage in the first place.”

“Sabotage,” Pitt said. “Like the rifles, and the powder, and the general disarray from opening muster. Those are captain’s cares, Tom, not the business of a sheriff.”

Tom picked an unbroken bottle off the floor. He drew the cork and drank until the rum warmed his gut. “Unless the sheriff played a part.”

Pitt smiled as if his teeth were ready to explode. “I hope you aren’t accusing me of purposeful disruption.”

“No,” Tom lied. “You’re naturally inept.”

Benjamin edged around Abigail, crunching the debris as he moved. He adjusted his glasses more securely on his head and stood between Tom and Pitt, not quite tall enough to interrupt their stares. “There is the possibility, however unlikely,” he said, “that the cannon spontaneously fired. Certain varieties of powder, especially those that utilize the sawdust of smoak—”

“And did the tongs spontaneously tumble from the heavens?” Abigail asked. “We could theorize for hours or confine ourselves to facts. I know you think me wrong to harp upon it so,” she said to Tom, “but much of the tavern’s recent trouble has an element in common. Can anyone account for Molly at the time of the explosion?”

Ichabod clattered from the wreckage in the corner, stooping as he came so as not to bump the cheeses hanging from the rafters. Nabby raised a lantern to illuminate his gestures; his hands cast elongated shadows on the walls.

“Molly was down at the road,” Tom interpreted.

“That isn’t what he said,” Nabby corrected out of sheer orneriness. “She was with him at the cannon.”

Abigail hmph-ed with tight-clamped lips, but Ichabod persisted with another round of signs.

Nabby watched his hands and said, “She left before the shot and talked to Bess beneath the tree. After that, he doesn’t know.”

Having nothing else to add, Ichabod navigated the dangling cheeses and began shoveling rubble into a large dirty box, looking happy to have tried exonerating Molly.

“Get Bess,” Abigail told Nabby.

Nabby fixed her with a grim, sharpened eye and didn’t budge.

“I’m here,” Bess said, coming from the kitchen with her hair a sweaty ravel. She was breathless from her work and still agog at all the damage, and she wiped her palms firmly on her stained, shabby apron.

Tom put the bottle on a crate. His hand was trembling. He had drunk too fast with nothing in his stomach, and the smoke and pickled pork were giving him a headache. He needed room to think, needed room to breathe.

“You talked to Molly before the shot?”

“So did you,” Bess told him, “when you scolded us for gabbing.”

“There you have it,” Tom said, as if the cannon hadn’t fired ten minutes later. Dust motes swirled, causing him to squint.

“It concerns me,” Abigail said, “how readily and blindly you protect her.”

“You make a lot of folks’ business your concern,” Tom said. “I would hate to see you branded as a gossip and a meddler.”

Benjamin sniffed so hard his nostrils almost shut. Friend or not, Tom was very close to slandering his wife. He swelled his fragile chest, filling out his coat until it looked as if his ribs might fracture from the strain.

Abigail ignored them both and kept on with Bess. “You were with her all the time?”

“No,” Bess said. “Tom walked away, and then a funny little man … Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” She fought to hold a giggle at whatever she remembered.

“What?” Tom said.

“There was a man, swore he knew her. He was short, and squatly built, and kept making secret little gestures to his nose. Like this,” she said and showed them, smiling as she did so. “At first I thought I’d finally learn a smidgen of her past, but then he acted awful strange and said he knew her husband!”

It was as if another cannon had exploded in the distance.

“Find him,” Abigail said.

“You don’t think it’s true! But he’s gone,” Bess said. “He and a group of merchants rode away to beat the dark.”

“Which direction?” Pitt asked.

“’Cross the ferry, off to Liberty.”

Pitt looked from Bess to Abigail and Tom. A gleam lit his eyes, like a tiny pair of demons, and he marched toward the door, better than he’d marched all day during muster.

Tom laughed, and yet it pained him like a rupture in his chest. “You’re riding out for this?”

Pitt smiled from the door.

“It’s almost dusk,” Tom said. “The Maimers’ll be out. On second thought, go. Although aside from your coat, I can’t think of anything they’d bother cutting off.”

Pitt ignored the insult but heeded the warning: night fell swiftly in the woods. “I’ll go at dawn,” he said.

“She hasn’t caused trouble all month,” Tom said, stumbling backward with his heels against the barrel of the cannon. “If it’s me you want to hit, aim at me direct.”

“Housing a woman in need is one thing,” Abigail said. “Housing another man’s wife…”

It was quiet outside and turning violet in the twilight, pregnant with the dark and overripe, overdue. Ichabod was still, Bess was scared to say more, and Nabby held the lantern up and kept her own counsel. Tom looked to Benjamin for sensible support. The doctor sighed as when a wound was past the power of his art.

“Tom,” Benjamin said. “It may be time we learned the truth.”

Even you,
Tom thought, hardened to the marrow. He’d been fighting against the current since he caught her in the river. “People have a right to earn a fresh start.”

“Look at the ruin at your feet,” Abigail said, surprising Tom briefly with a ring of genuine pity. “She’s a firebrand. You shouldn’t have to bear—”

“Speak another ill word against a person under my roof,” he said, “I’ll pick you up and throw you out the goddamned hole.”

Abigail recoiled, mostly from the blasphemy.

“You go too far,” Benjamin declared. He sounded like a skinny man, delicately boned, whose principles and pride made him physically imposing.