Bell Weather (36 page)

“I have far too many ties,” he said, “to sever all connections, but in time—another year, perhaps—a simpler situation may be carefully arranged.”

“A year!” Molly said. “I cannot bear another day!”

He paused and said, “I know,” speaking with a mournful twinge that seemed—she may have imagined it—to show a little more than disappointment. Was it fear? “You would risk all we have—”

“Yes,” she interrupted.

“—for your own selfish needs.”

Her brother said it crisply and she bristled at the words. She stood behind the books and leaned against a stack of them. They formed a kind of stairway, threatening to fall.

“I do as I am told and sit and die of boredom while you jaunt wherever you please, doing God knows what, and what is my reward? A window to the street! My brother as a husband! Is it selfish to be happy, selfish to be free? I’d have loved John Summer if he leeched me and abused me, long as I was anywhere but suffocating here. Don’t you see?” Molly asked. “I would sooner leave Grayport than scratch another letter. I would rather board a ship and sail back to Umber.”

Nicholas twirled the penknife slowly in his fingers till he grasped it by the middle of the blade, as if to throw it.

“Don’t be childish,” she said. “Am I supposed to be afraid?”

She was poised when she said it but a feeling came upon her, one of distances expanding, like a long fall of night. Frances and her father, infinitely far. John Summer, less than one mile off, soon to leave. Even the little office opened like a gulf until it seemed they ought to shout to make themselves heard.

Nicholas threw the knife with a deftly snapped wrist. Molly moved aside. It hit the beam between the window frames and wedged in the grain. Molly felt the air disappearing from her lungs. He had honed it—she could see the extra brightness of the edge.

“You might have killed me,” Molly gasped.

“I was certain you would move.”

“Were you certain of your aim?”

“More than anything,” he said.

He walked around the desk and met her near the table, righting the stack of books she had tilted out of place. She picked up a volume—
The Rudiments of Bruntish Grammar
—and considered thumping his head, but when he reached toward the knife, Molly reached for it, too. Her hand covered his own. The blade remained stuck and they were posed, close together, like a married couple standing at the window of their home.

Nicholas turned to face her. “What does John know?”

“He knows I’m miserable and wish to get away,” Molly said, hoping that her words would distract him from the dodge.

He had a way of going dead-eyed, lost in concentration, and of instantly reviving when it came time to speak. “I erred,” he said, “when we met Kofi Baa. I should have told him we were siblings.”

“Wouldn’t he understand if we explained ourselves now?”

“He might. He has a kindness in him, near to gullibility. If not for his success, I would think him too na
ï
ve. But Kofi himself is not the main concern. In the work from which I’ve shielded you—oftentimes to guard you—I have made certain enemies.”

“Who?” Molly asked, letting go of the knife.

Nicholas tugged it out. “People worse than Kofi. They would thrill to see me scandal-bound or suddenly exposed. I have also made allies who take me at my word. Think if such persons learned our parentage and past.”

“We could still keep the secret of our father either way. Must we play at being married?”

“One lie supports another.”

“John is coming back,” she said.

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let him go,” Nicholas told her. “I will give you greater leave. Don’t defy me just now—consider it, at least. You said it isn’t John but freedom you desire. This is a dangerous point for both of us, more than you can know. Hold fast awhile longer. It would shatter me to lose you.”

Nicholas handed her the knife. She looked to where it had stuck and couldn’t find the mark. The cut was either shaded or miraculously healed. Molly shaved a fine wooden coil off the window frame.

“What if it’s John himself instead of freedom I desire?”

“We will see when he returns,” Nicholas replied.

*   *   *

She hadn’t bled in three months. More intuitively, she sensed it, and she didn’t need a doctor or a kick to make it real.

Molly had written to John Summer once a week since he left. At first he’d written back. He missed her and was hoping to return with some solution, but he had met with complications, opportunities, delays. His letters came sporadically. She couldn’t use Nicholas’s couriers, so they kept their correspondence through the ordinary channels, which were slow and indirect and largely unreliable. The distant town of Kinship lacked a formal post office; Molly sent her letters to a tavern called the Hook where they sat, perhaps for days, until he went to pick them up.

She had finally sent the news—she was pregnant, no mistake—and since he hadn’t written back in thirteen days, she had no way of knowing if her letter had arrived. Silence was the worst of all replies: a strangulation. She imagined telling Nicholas, or dying like her mother, or surviving with an infant. Would they move? Would they stay? She thought of how it had felt losing her virginity, squeezing him inside until the break made her bleed, and now a whole head and body were expected to emerge. She found herself attuned to every passing infant, admiring their delicacy and sizing up their skulls.

Late at night, she’d lie in bed and smell the chill of early autumn as the crisp brown leaves blew against her window. She’d pray for John’s reply and gently rub her belly. Oh, to think of it! The eyes and ears growing in the dark, the miniature heart like a rare, perfect berry. She longed to hum a lullaby but Nicholas would hear, and so she tried to think of sunlight and laughter and relief, of the view atop the
Cleaver
and the bell of Beacon Mount, hoping her emotions were umbilically connected and the comfort she was summoning would nourish them together.

One morning in mid-October, Molly woke to find ice-flowered windows in her room. The sun was cold and white. She had overslept the dawn and Nicholas hadn’t woken her, a thing so doubly strange she took it as an omen and hesitated to leave the safety of her blankets. The city’s early noise made the house too quiet. She wondered if her baby felt the same inside her womb, sensing all the world’s movement and desiring to join it, striving to be out regardless of the risk.

She rose, tight with cold, and dressed in slippers and a robe. The fire wasn’t lit and she could almost see her breath. Halfway down the stairs, heat began to rise. She could tell there was someone in the parlor with her brother, and she paused in the darkness at the bottom near the door. They had heard her coming down and stopped their conversation. She considered going back and getting properly dressed but then it seemed as if her baby, with its own strong will, put her hand upon the knob and moved her into the parlor.

Sun dispelled the gloom and there was Nicholas, strictly seated, with the wintry hard expression he had shown to Mr. Fen.

John Summer stood to meet her in a fine green coat. He smiled and his buttons, warm gold, winked and shone. There was fire, there was warmth—there was John come to save her. Molly’s baby seemed to gain a new buoyancy within her, and her feet left the floor when he crossed the room and hugged her.

He put her down and held her waist, thumbs around her navel.

Molly wiped her eyes and said, “I thought you’d gone forever.”

“So did I,” Nicholas said.

John’s hands felt wooden through the wrinkles of her shift. They faced Nicholas like a pair of young lovers with a parent.

“Now that all four of us are present,” Nicholas said, “we should formulate a practical solution to our crisis. First and foremost, however, I will say congratulations.”

The word’s warmth, so at odds with the coldness of his voice, left her brittle when he stood and offered her a hand. She took it automatically. He led her to a chair. John held her other hand and followed close behind her and the men seemed prepared to pull her limb from limb.

The three of them sat together, equidistant in their chairs but angled so it seemed that Nicholas was separate. Between them stood a round mahogany table on a rug. Upon it were an oil lamp, paper, and an inkwell. The parlor was a compact, low-ceilinged square with the walls dark red above the ivory-painted wainscot. Countless conversations had occurred here in private. Molly sensed it in the hissing of the logs, like a whisper. It was Nicholas’s room, Nicholas’s air.

She looked at John Summer, disbelieving he was real. He returned a look of kindness, and apology, and strength.

He said, “I’ve told your brother everything.”

He didn’t mean it literally but Molly felt disrobed. She hugged herself and lowered her head, trying not to flush. She felt as if Nicholas had witnessed her and John making love and could observe, as through a windowpane, the baby in her womb.

“I mean to marry you and take you to Kinship,” John said. He quickly added, “If you’ll have me, poor and faulty as I am.”

Molly didn’t see her brother roll his eyes, but sensing he had done so dampened the proposal.

“It’s far enough to keep us free of scandal,” John continued.

“What will happen,” Nicholas asked, “when someone who knows us travels north and finds you living with the lovely Mrs. Smith?”

“I will keep her out of sight.”

“Like a mistress or a whore?”

John stood and scraped the chair, violently erect. “It was you, was it not, who conceived the false marriage?”

“A necessary ruse.”

“Did you really think your sister would be bound to you forever?”

“Evidently not,” Nicholas replied.

Was it injury or shame that marred her brother’s countenance? His features fell, softening his eyes to leave them fuller, and his cheekbones lengthened, and his brows seemed to frown. He was plain as any page she’d ever had to translate but written in a dialect she didn’t understand.

“The three of us could move wherever we like,” Molly said.

“My work is here,” Nicholas said.

“And mine is north,” John agreed.

Nicholas crossed his legs and locked his fingers over his knee. He turned to Molly and said, “You needn’t wrestle with the choice between your brother and your lover. You chose many weeks ago. Nature saw it through. You and John must go. I will stay here in Grayport.”

For weeks, Molly had tried to think of practical solutions. Uncle Nicholas. Her brother and her lover at her side, with the baby, starting over in an unfamiliar home. Impossible, impossible. She had to go with John. But he was virtually a stranger, much as she adored him, and to live without Nicholas, her brother and her mirror—it was almost too foreign and unthinkable to stomach.

“Your absence will be noted,” Nicholas reminded her. “I’ll say that you are caring for a relative in need. A sister with paralysis, perhaps, or sudden blindness. But Kinship is far too near,” he said to John. “You will have to take her farther to the north or overseas.”

John bridled at the order, sitting down but leaning forward. He mastered his distress and said, “I’ve spent the last three months establishing my livelihood.”

“A season,” Nicholas said. “Scarcely time to grow a fetus. You will sever ties with Kofi—”

“Kofi Baa will know the truth.”

“And he would probably embrace you. But everything I have is built upon trust. Would you scar the reputation of your new wife’s brother? Molly,” Nicholas said. “Would you willingly destroy me?”

Molly gripped an armrest, fighting down nausea.

“Kofi cannot know,” she said.

John remained stoically attentive to her brother but his eyelids sagged. “The man is like my father.”

“
You
are now a father,” Nicholas replied. “Take another three months and carve a niche where no one knows you.”

John’s thigh muscles flexed as if preparing for a lunge but he stayed within his seat. Nicholas turned to Molly. He was seated near the fire and his left cheek was pinker than the right. He leaned toward her.

“You’ll be showing soon,” he said. “I will take you from the city. We will stay in isolation through the autumn and into winter. As soon as John is settled, I will see you to his side.”

He was tearful when he said it. Molly had rarely seen him cry, and though she trusted that he loved her and believed she had wounded him, she wondered whether the light was playing tricks with her eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The plan proceeded as agreed, dissatisfying all. John Summer traveled by riverboat to Kinship, there to uproot himself again and extend whatever prospects remained to distant Burn, a glorified hamlet—nearly at the border of New Rouge—that was surrounded by a palisade to fend off wolves. It was to be Molly and John’s frigid, permanent home in a matter of months, and in the interim Nicholas took her out of Grayport to a cabin in the north to await John’s summons.

The isolated dwelling, rented from one of Nicholas’s contacts in the city, was situated in the wilderness east of Kinship, accessible only by a pitiful road and, for the last ten miles, a fur trappers’ path through the untamed forest. It stood in a leaf-strewn clearing near a gorge with a creek. Thirty feet long and fifteen wide, the log cabin was a single story with a peaked roof, a door and window at the front, a stone chimney, and a crude puncheon floor. The room around the hearth comprised most of the interior. A loft along the back held Nicholas’s bedding, and a dividing wall afforded Molly her own chilly space with a proper bed and—though the room’s doorway had no door—a modicum of privacy. Still it seemed severe, even punitively spartan.

“Could we not have simply hidden in a well-furnished house?” Molly asked.

“We have everything we need,” Nicholas replied.

This was not strictly true. Her brother had hired a man named Edgar to carry their meager belongings and deliver supplies throughout the season. He had a grizzly black beard and the power of a bear but was short and compact: a miniature giant. Molly had failed to engage him in conversation on their way to the cabin, and he had left without a word as soon as he was able, under orders to return in two weeks’ time.