Bell Weather (22 page)

Bess finished dressing in a clean, dry shift and said, “It’s laundry day—I haven’t any shifts for you to borrow. At least wring your skirts out and change your muddy stockings.”

Bess pulled a fresh pair of stockings from her drawer, guided Molly into a chair, and knelt down before her. After twisting Molly’s hems and taking off her shoes, Bess startled her by reaching up to untie her garters. She peeled the filthy stockings off Molly’s cold legs and held her feet against her own bare knees, looking up.

“Thank you,” Molly said, shivering in the pause.

The thunder had abated to a deep, constant rumble, and the windswept rain hushed around the room. Molly’s soles began to warm. A light from outdoors made the room look greener, giving a hint of renewal to the withered flowers on the walls and infusing Bess’s face with weird, ghostly tones.

Bess settled on her heels and said, “You must remember family.”

Molly shook her head.

“Your parents?” Bess said. “A sister or a brother?”

“No.”

“They say you came from Umber and you really do remember and you’re only keeping secrets. If it’s true, you can tell me,” Bess offered in a whisper.

Molly stood and crossed the room, goosefleshed and bumping into the corner of the bed. She backed against the windowpanes and hugged herself tightly, hearing Abigail’s voice condemning her deceits, and she was just about to stammer out another weak lie when Bess seized her arm and tugged her from the window.

“What are you doing?” Molly asked.

“St. Verna’s Fire!”

Molly twirled around to look and marveled at the source of the peculiar tinted light. The rain and wind had lessened and the lightning had subsided, but the gloom was faintly lit by strangely glowing objects. Part of a tree, from its uppermost leaves to its middle, smoldered green like embers through a stained-glass pane. The leaves remained intact while the light moved and spread.

“Keep away from the window,” Bess said. “It isn’t safe.”

But Molly drifted forward, curious and awed, and Bess ignored her own advice and followed at her side. The meetinghouse steeple was a pale green spire. Several peaked roofs, puddles in the road, fence posts, and barrel stacks streamed luminescence. A pushcart filled until the color overflowed. The light kept shifting, fading in one place and surging up brighter somewhere else. Molly touched the windowpane and filaments appeared, glowing and electric where her fingers met the glass. She felt a tingle, pulled away, and tried a second time.

“What is it?”

“It’s a kind of clinging lightning,” Bess said. “Dr. Benjamin obsesses. How I hope he sees it!”

“It’s gorgeous,” Molly said.

“Look! It’s gotten Scratch!”

A cat ran below from the river past the tavern, trailing fuzzy sparks and yowling out of sight.

“The poor thing!” Molly said.

“Scratch has weathered worse.”

The darkened figure of a boy appeared beyond the sycamore. He ran toward the tavern, looking every which way, until the glow gathered in and lit itself upon him. It started with his hands and rippled to his face and then he stopped. Light drifted like vapor off his head.

Molly ran toward the door.

“No, you can’t!” Bess said.

Molly left the room and hurried up the hall as Bess began clattering through her drawers for more to wear. She ran downstairs, almost falling on an oddly warped step near the bottom. Static shocked her when she reached toward the handle of the door.

Someone grabbed her arm. Molly shrieked. It was Tom.

“There’s a boy—” she said.

“I know.”

“But someone has to—”

“Don’t,” he said.

He smelled of horse and pinewood and fiery agitation. Molly felt his pleasurable wringing of her arm, tight as when he’d held her in the middle of the river.

“Let me go!” she said.

“It’s dangerous. You can’t.”

She tried to hit him. Tom caught her slap and then her hair was in her face and Molly steamed, red and heaving in the cramped little stairwell. No matter how she squirmed, Tom’s hold could not be broken. She could shout or kick or struggle but she knew it wouldn’t work, so she kissed him very hard and blew directly into his mouth. She had done it once to Frances; it had startled her immensely. Tom reacted just the same and let her go. Molly bolted.

Out the door and into the rain—she saw the child all afire. Tom shouted and pursued her but she’d never lost a race, and now she felt the spur of furious defiance.
Cowards!
Molly thought.
To leave a child in the storm!
She cut her heel on a stick and slipped around in the mud but she was close enough to see the boy’s terrified expression.

“No!” he cried. He raised his hands and warded her away.

He’s only frightened,
Molly thought, neither heeding him nor slowing.

Tom pounded up behind her, faster than expected. The boy was straight ahead, spectral green and sizzling. Molly reached to grab him and connected with his hands. She saw a flash and heard a crack—had something hit her head?—and then the ground was falling upward and the green went black.

*   *   *

“Her heart is beating.”

“Dr. Knox!”

“Is she breathing?”

“Doctor, my
son.
”

“Quiet, plea—”

“I’ll not be quiet! She can die for all I care!”

Voices came to her in wool—heavy, wet, dense—with a fine, high ring. Molly opened her eyes and Benjamin was close, kneeling over her and smiling. He was rain-soaked and dripping with his hand below her ear, reading Molly’s pulse and holding her head above the floor. Bess was muddy in a robe and peered over his shoulder, looking powerfully relieved that Molly had revived. Tom was at her side. His hair was wet and ratty, he was scarecrow stiff, and he appraised her with a look of hard-bitten fury. Molly wondered if he’d clubbed her on the head when she was running.

Wishbones dangled from the rafters overhead. How had she gotten inside, in what appeared to be the taproom? A man with frizzy eyebrows stood before a small group of patrons, all of whom regarded her with kindly curiosity, and somewhere out of sight, a woman called hysterically—and angrily, at length—for Dr. Benjamin’s attention.

The boy!
Molly thought, sitting with a jolt.

Her body felt heavy and her skull was hard to lift, full of odd motion like a half-set pudding. Molly groaned. Her vision wavered and her limbs throbbed and tingled. A smell of hammered metal, very like a smithy, burned her nose when she exhaled, as if the odor were inside her.

“The boy,” Molly said. “What happened to the boy?”

“Nearly dead!” cried the out-of-sight woman with conviction.

“He is well,” Benjamin said.

Before he could elaborate, the woman carried on, saying the boy was
not
well but deaf as stone, and cooked from skin to marrow, and if the doctor insisted on caring for the girl instead of her own innocent son—

“Mrs.
Downs,
” Tom said, so coldly that the woman stopped, leaving nothing but the ringing in Molly’s sore head.

She turned and saw the boy behind her near the bar, grubby from the storm but otherwise intact. His mother, Mrs. Downs, stooped tearfully beside him. She was an ample, frilly woman with a wide straw hat, the brim of which rested on the boy’s wild hair. She looked at Molly with ferocity but dithered as she stared, as if surprised to see a girl rather than a devil.

“Are you deaf as stone?” Benjamin asked the boy.

“No, sir.”

“Do you suffer any pain?”

“Only prickles,” said the boy, “like I slept right strange.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Downs, you have nothing grave to fear.”

“I don’t understand,” Molly mumbled at her feet.

“It was St. Verna’s Fire,” Benjamin said, unabashedly delighted. He appeared to struggle greatly not to question her at once about its character, its force, its bodily effects. “The charge is quite benign, equipollent I would say to commonplace static, till an uncharged object—you, in this particular instance—releases and ignites its marvelous potential. It is rare,” he continued, “but familiar here in Root. The charge would have harmlessly diffused in several minutes.”

“I’m sorry!” Molly said directly to the boy.

He responded with a scowl and rubbed the prickles from his arm. He blamed her, Molly knew—he had tried to ward her off—and his resentment made her ribs tighten like a corset. Bess caressed Molly’s back but the pressure hurt her muscles.

“Please, you must believe me,” Molly said. “I didn’t know.”

Tom stepped up and said, “I told you it was dangerous.”

His shadowy face and untied hair gave him a savage aura but his anger lacked conviction and he shifted, self-aware, as if the issue weren’t the lightning but the fact that she had kissed him.

“She didn’t know the nature of the danger,” Benjamin said.

“I told her not to go.”

“I thought…,” Molly said but quickly shut her mouth.

“What?” Tom said, leaning in close.

She forced herself to straighten up. He tried to stare her down. The tingle in her limbs traveled to her heart until her blood felt charged, hot enough to hiss.

“I only meant to help,” she said. “I thought you were a coward.”

The room collectively inhaled and everyone looked at Tom. He moved his lips as if to speak and seemed to stammer in his thoughts, by turns offended and surprised and finally dumb as wood.

“Insolence!” said Mrs. Downs. “You were warned and acted anyway with reckless disregard. I have more than half a mind to speak to Sheriff Pitt and see you held accountable.”

Tom reacted as if she’d thrown a burning log across the room, striding away to placate her and, as far as could be heard above the reignited chatter, defending Molly’s act from criminal complaint. The curious patrons returned to their table in the front of the taproom. Benjamin sat Molly in a chair beside the hearth where she could warm herself, and Bess brought her a hot mulled cider that settled her nerves, if only slightly, after standing up to Tom.

“He has a temper, but you mustn’t take it to heart,” Bess said, holding Molly’s hand while Benjamin reexamined her pupils, pulse, and ears.

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Thirteen minutes!” Bess said, and she explained how they had dragged her and the boy inside, the latter recovering quickly when his mother arrived in a panic, having witnessed the event from a nearby house. Ichabod had ridden off and hurried back with Benjamin, who gladly braved the storm amid the luminous display.

“And here you are, right as science,” Benjamin told her with a wink. “You must describe it to me in detail this evening after dinner.”

Molly’s hearing had improved, the ringing had decreased, and although her tingling pain had given way to aches, she cozied into her chair, thankful for the fire and the sweet warm cider. Even the ire of Tom and Mrs. Downs couldn’t mar the tavern’s atmosphere of venerable wood, kitchen fragrances, and safety. She would have gladly spent an hour in the taproom with Bess, but Abigail arrived. Molly ducked her head.

Mrs. Downs leapt up and flounced across the room. Abigail, drizzly and besmirched from the weather, showed inimitable control when Mrs. Downs blocked her at the entrance of the taproom and said, “Here at last! She nearly killed my boy and shows remorse by disrespecting me and Tom. If I cannot go to the sheriff, you have all the more to answer for, Abigail Knox. She is yours. You took her in and she is yours to mind and govern!”

“I will not respond to raving,” Abigail said.

She passed Mrs. Downs, who turned a dumbfounded scarlet, and walked toward Molly with the same cold poise.

“What has happened?” she asked Benjamin.

Mrs. Downs began to answer very shrilly from the door.

“I will thank you for your silence,” Abigail told her, “while I hear it plainly told.”

Mrs. Downs was so incensed she took the boy and left, grumbling all the way, while everyone in the tavern—Molly, Tom, Bess, and the patrons—listened patiently to Benjamin’s meticulous account. Abigail stood and watched Molly through the telling. Tom lit a pipe but then forgot to smoke it. Finding it dead when Benjamin finished the story, he put it down, poured himself a rum, and drank with a frown. He hadn’t looked at Molly since her challenge from the floor and seemed to avoid doing so now.

“The boy is well enough, it seems, to be dragged from the tavern,” Abigail said. Then, to Molly, “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Molly croaked.

Abigail inquired what had brought her to the tavern, and Molly explained about the nyx she’d tried delivering for Benjamin.

“Without informing me.”

“I thought you wouldn’t let me.”

“Take her home,” Tom said.

He spoke it so indifferently, it drained Molly’s breath and the words sank darkly to the bottom of her stomach. Abigail turned to look at Tom without reply. Her customary edge at being told what to do was blunted by the fact—as Mrs. Downs had pointed out—that Molly was hers to keep. She
had
to take her home.

Bess retrieved Molly’s shoes from the bedroom upstairs. Molly put them on and Benjamin helped her stand. Abigail reminded him he was likely needed elsewhere following the storm, and then she blinked once at Molly, pivoted in place, and walked toward the door, expecting her to follow.

“Bess,” Tom said. “Help Nabby in the kitchen.”

She squeezed Molly’s hand, reluctant to abandon her, but Molly turned away from her new friend’s attention, fearing sympathy and tenderness would only make her cry.

“Come see me again,” Bess said before retreating to the kitchen.

And what could Molly do but follow Abigail home when there was nowhere else to go and no one else would have her?

*   *   *

The Knoxes’ cleanly painted walls and uncluttered rooms looked spartan, even stark, after the warm and motley palette of the tavern. Benjamin sent word that he had bones to set, an adze-wound to dress, and a baby to deliver before returning home. Molly helped with chores without being asked and Abigail allowed it, neither lecturing nor guiding. The women supped without speaking, and once night had fallen and the major work was done, they sat making candles in the firelit kitchen.