TOWN OF ROOT, CONTINENT OF FLORIA, 1763
Root burgeoned with fertility, surging back to life far more emphatically than other parts of Floria. Spring greened the town and brought better air—cool and minty in the shade, wholesome in the light—and the forest grew thicker after every burst of rain. The Antler River had receded, the flowers of the flood had drifted southward over the falls, and all around town people tidied up their homes, painting and repairing after winter’s abuse.
Tom Orange swung his ax and split a log behind the tavern, where the garden was erupting with its pumpkin vines, bean sprouts, and panoply of herbs. His ribs had mostly healed and his bruises had diminished after the rescue in the river. He was active dawn to midnight, spirited and strong, busy as the song bees that looped around his head. These were bees that buzzed in melody to harmonize the hive. The songs were quick and simple like the music of the birds, but though a single bee was charming, and the hive all together made a gorgeous humming choir, three or four around his ears buzzing different tunes—in and out, in and out—were maddeningly noisy.
Tom swung his ax again, trying to ignore them. He was boiling wort for beer and needed more wood, but as so often happened at the critical stage of brewing, multiple distractions endangered his efforts. A song bee dove and crawled inside his hair, just as Ichabod gangled out to summon him inside and the ax blade jammed in a hard black knot. The bee was under his ponytail, tickling Tom’s neck. He freed the ax, looked up, and said, “What?”
The voiceless Ichabod had lived in the Orange for so many years that his expressions and hand signs were comprehensible to Tom, except in certain instances of odd specificity. He gestured, “Come inside, someone is here,” with perfect clarity but indicated trouble with his tall, knitted brow.
From the road around front came the sound of cheerful voices.
“Travelers,” Tom said, surprised he hadn’t noticed sooner.
But Ichabod responded yes, and no, and both together till his head began to swivel. Tom swatted at his ponytail but couldn’t find the bee. He second-guessed how much sassafras and withered monk he’d already added to the hops, and he was about to check the angle of the sun—he kept track of the boiling time by instinct and slow-moving shadow—when Ichabod loped across the garden, picked a berry from a bush, and dotted it repeatedly on his forehead and cheeks.
He stood before Tom with his red-speckled face.
“Lem,” Tom said.
Ichabod nodded.
Steam billowed from the pot and almost scalded Tom’s chin. He backed away, clapped his neck, and caught the bee beneath his hair. It stung his palm twice but he didn’t let go; if only he had hands big enough for Lem. Other bees surrounded him, apparently aware their compatriot was trapped, and buzzing something different now: a choral song of battle.
“Where’s Bess?” Tom asked.
Ichabod pointed up, his finger ringed with bees, wincing as he did so and eager to escape.
Tom gauged the simmer of the wort by its burble. He had fifteen minutes, maybe less, till he strained it. Too soon or too late and it was hardly worth keeping. Ichabod was dutiful but couldn’t read the boil. There was no good choice but to hurry inside and so he strode toward the door, letting go of the bee and leaving half his mind swirling in the belly of the copper.
He entered through the kitchen. Nabby chopped chickens, setting aside the beaks for talismanic garlands. She was short and had the spongy-firm skin of dried apples. No one knew her age; she’d been old when Tom was young. She spent every day of the year baking bread and pies, cooking meat, tending the hearth, and speaking of ghosts and omens as matter-of-factly as other people gossiped. Now she chewed a slice of liver, her infallible means of testing a bird’s acceptability, and frowned as if to say, “I know a group has come.”
Tom picked a stinger from his palm and fixed his hair. “Lem’s here again.”
“I have a nose,” Nabby said.
Indeed, the nourishing smell of the kitchen had succumbed to Lem’s stink, one of carcasses and flesh and foul, bubbling dyes. A smoaknut of tension grew in Tom’s chest, very like the bullet lodged in his shoulder. He left Nabby with her beaks and walked up front.
The taproom was cozy-dim even in the daylight, its furniture and floor weathered smooth by decades of visitors, browned by dirt and polish, spill and wipe, smoke and time. Tom could almost stand straight inside the unlit hearth; one of its stones was like a face, another like a wolf. Windows at the front overlooked the road, with the town down left and the river down right. The room was big enough for fourscore people, tightly packed, and smelled of fire and tobacco, travelers’ sweat and rum—an odor so familiar it was virtually his own. He knew the table nicks, the rafter cracks, the stains and warps and creaky chairs as thoroughly as any of the marks upon his body. However full of strangers, it would always be his home.
What to make of Uncle Lem: relative or stranger? He was muscular and tall, with receding, stringy hair. He stood in the middle of the taproom, blood-browned apron tied around his waist, bearing so little resemblance to his sister—Tom’s diminutive mother, now deceased—that an unknowing eye would never have spotted their relation.
Tom approached him as a small group of travelers entered in the front. Before a word was spoken, Lem crossed the room and clomped aggressively to Ichabod, who’d followed through the kitchen with the berry-juice dots still covering his face. Ichabod flinched and cracked his elbow on the doorframe.
Tom caught his uncle by the arm, using all his strength just to slow him down. Lem turned and the window light clearly showed his face. His cheeks and forehead were mottled, like most of his skin, with small crimson freckles: the permanent marks of bloodpox. The marks were exceedingly rare—few people who caught the sickness during the last serious outbreak had lived; it had killed Lem’s wife and nearly killed him—and they were generally less pronounced even among survivors.
“We were slapping song bees and Ichabod had berries in his hands,” Tom said.
It was an explanation so unlikely, Lem paused to doubt it, giving Ichabod time to clean his face with a handkerchief and hurry outside to tend to the travelers’ horses. Lem watched him go, grimacing and flexing. He was a lifelong tanner with an air of rotten skins. His tannery was failing due to his drunkenness and sloth. He was sober now, or seemed to be, and although Tom intended to keep him that way, he led his uncle to the gated bar in the corner, away from the entering travelers, and said, “Bess isn’t here. I sent her up to Mapple’s farm to get a brace of rabbits.”
“She’s upstairs. I seen her at the window.”
Tom sighed and wished his cousin knew better how to hide. He said, “You can’t keep doing this. She’s here of her own accord.”
“It ain’t right.”
“It wasn’t right abusing her for years and driving her off midwinter, when you were laid up drunk and she had nothing to eat but horsemeat and old black bread.”
Tom advanced when he said it, berating himself again for failing to help Bess sooner and physically inclined to hammer out his conscience.
“I’m turning a new leaf,” Lem said. “But it’s a hard thing when my own nephew treats me like an enemy. I won’t hurt her anymore.”
“Anymore,” Tom said, to mark the underlying fact.
Lem narrowed his eyes, which were tiny to begin with, and said, “I’ll fetch her down myself.”
Tom opened the bar and poured his uncle half a tankard of cider. Half a tankard too much.
“Thankee,” Lem said, giving him a smile that was, despite his fetid teeth, sweetly reminiscent of Tom’s mother. “Though it won’t help business serving half cups of drink.”
“You’re welcome that it’s free,” Tom said. “Set right here while I go and greet the guests.”
They were two men and a woman, dusty and gregarious. It was already late morning and they were the first travelers of the day, an unusual thing for spring when the road was clear to ride, but understandable in light of the continuing Maimer attacks. Tom crossed the room with his tavern-keeper’s smile. He introduced himself and shook their hands, encouraging them to sit and apologizing that he needed to run upstairs.
“I won’t be a minute,” he said. “Make yourselves at home.”
“Many do,” Lem said, tankard to his mouth so he echoed in the pewter.
Tom hastened upstairs, wary of leaving his uncle unchaperoned and suddenly unsure whether he had relocked the bar. Straight to Bess’s door, which was shut. He knocked and entered. The room was naturally lit and sparsely furnished, with enough dried flowers on the wall to make it both feminine and morbid. Bess hid in a shadow just beyond the window, waiting in the hope that Lemuel would leave.
She started when Tom entered, lighting her cheek with sun and looking pretty in her cap and blue-striped skirt. She clasped her hands tight for self-reassurance.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she said and stared at him beseechingly, seemingly embarrassed and afraid to disappoint him.
Tom loved his cousin dearly, and he found it as strange to play the role of her protector—she was twenty years old, only seven years younger than himself—as he did to play elder to his middle-aged uncle. But he was far too annoyed to shelter her today.
“You’re needed downstairs,” he said.
“I don’t want to see him.”
“Neither do I, but he’s your father.”
She flushed but it was spirit more than weakness that inflamed her. He could tell because he often had the same flush himself.
“This can’t go on,” Tom said.
“You wouldn’t send me back!”
“What’s the difference if he’s here every day?” But seeing how it panicked her, he added, “You can stay. Send him off and get to work. It’s why you’re living here, remember.”
He left her there to follow him down—he’d give her half a minute—and paused to calm his temper when he reached the bottom of the stairs. He twisted on the handrail and pulled until it creaked, wanting it to hold, expecting it to break. He peeked at Lem and the travelers from the kitchen doorway, found them just as he had left them, and jogged outside to check the boiling copper. Another bee stung his neck; they were furious today. He still had time before the wort needed straining, so he left it once more and went to stabilize the house.
Lem and Bess stood at the bar, bound in intimate whispers, while his cousin poured drinks and placed them on a tray. Tom passed them and continued up front to see the guests.
“I’ve had your company before,” he told the oldest of the group, a man with thinning hair and frizzy gray eyebrows. “Last July, if I remember right. Mr. Hoopworth the banker.”
“A trip on urgent business,” Mr. Hoopworth replied. “Prodigious memory you have!”
“A tavern keep’s memory,” the second man said. He was delicately formed but confidently voiced, dandified with ruffles on his collar and his cuffs.
“It helps to warm a welcome,” Tom answered with a nod. He turned to Mr. Hoopworth again and said, “You liked a cup of smoak.”
“He has talked of little else!” said the lady of the group. She was young and very tall, a spitting image of the dandy to her right—probably his sister. She had sweet, distracting dimples. “He has bound us both to try a cup on penalty of lecture. But what precisely is it?”
“A rich black drink made of strong local nuts,” Mr. Hoopworth explained.
Bess had filled the tray but been delayed by her father. Tom continued with the talk and hoped the travelers wouldn’t notice.
“Is it true that smoak trees are found only in Root?” the lady asked.
“Aye,” Tom said. “Last year a merchant tried growing them in Liberty. Every sapling died. They like it here at home.”
“With your extraordinary weather,” said the dandy. “We have waited several weeks for the road to finally clear.”
“I’m glad of open travel,” Tom said, forcing cheer. “We could do with fuller tables. Any trouble on the way?”
“We have all our vital parts,” the dandy said wryly.
Mr. Hoopworth coughed and gave his companions a censuring frown.
“You mean the Maimers,” said the lady, heating up pink from an over-show of courage. “Mr. Hoopworth worries you will frighten me with horrors.”
Her youthfulness and pluck reminded Tom of Molly, as a bright piece of brass reminds one of gold. He looked toward the door, picturing the Knoxes’ tidy house off the common, where Molly had been staying for the past three weeks and, according to Benjamin, had recovered in body if not entirely in spirit. She still claimed to remember nothing, but although most of the town suspected she was hiding a scandalous past, local interest had diminished owing to the dearth of new developments. Talk was of the Maimers, here and everywhere in Root, and as the last enduring sense of Molly was one of secret trouble, Tom had kept his distance. He had trouble enough already.
“My sister knows the tales,” the dandy said. “She has every right to hear them if she’s traveling the road.”
“I agree,” Tom said. “A person ought to know when someone wants her limbs. There was another attack Wednesday the last. A peddler lost his foot. Before that, they got a lawyer—John Pale—and took his tongue.”
John Pale had stayed a fortnight, terrified to leave, until he finally rode away, in sickly gray silence, with a company of seven armed trappers bound for Grayport.
“It’s terrible,” the lady said. “How is it the victims always come to Root?”
“The Maimers don’t attack close to Grayport or Liberty,” Tom said. “Authorities are thinner out here. Nearly all of the attacks have been within ten miles of the valley.”
“Someone ought to ride out and shoot them,” Mr. Hoopworth said.
“Convince the sheriff,” Tom answered, “and you’ll all drink smoak forever on the house.”
“You could ride out yourself,” said the dandy with a smirk.
Tom took this as bravado, arrogant but harmless. Still, it irked him: he had ridden out, more than once. The dandy plucked a short stray fiber from his jacket, preening as if the Maimers were a coffeehouse diversion.
Tom grinned and looked for Bess.
Lem clutched her arm and held her at the bar. Toughened by her childhood, she fought to struggle loose, but he squeezed so hard her eyes began to shine and the drink tray wavered, threatening to crash.
“Excuse me,” Tom said, turning from the table.
He crossed the room with blood pumping swiftly to his muscles.
“Let her go,” Tom said, grabbing Lem’s free wrist so they formed a kind of chain, familial and tense back beside the bar.
“I need her home,” Lem said.
“I need her serving drinks.”
“She ain’t yours to keep.”
“Nor am I yours,” Bess said, tugging free. Remarkably, she kept the drinks balanced on the tray, though her movement caused the liquid to precariously slosh.
Tom interposed himself so Bess could walk away and said to his uncle, “You’ve seen her. Now go home.”
Lem’s spots began to darken. He chested up close, raised his stubbled chin, and said, “I’ll tear this place to kindling if you don’t send her off.”
“You leave a splinter on the floor and I’ll get my rifle.”
Lem recoiled as if a flash pan had fired in his face. “You would shoot your own blood?”
“Bess is old enough to make her own way,” Tom said.
“I’ve spoken to Sheriff Pitt.”
“There’s nothing he can do.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Lem’s voice had a melodramatic falsity about it, but the threat wasn’t idle. Pitt would stab at any weakness. Tom balled his hand and the bee stings throbbed. He could almost hear his wort boiling over in the yard.
Lem stomped away toward the tavern’s front door. Bess saw him coming and retreated to the hearth, where she held the empty tray before her like a shield. He watched her as he passed and seemed about to speak when he bumped Mr. Hoopworth, who spilled his cup of smoak.
“Keep your woman close,” Lem told the men, “unless you want her stolen.”
The young lady gasped, more at Lem than at his words. The dandy stood defensively beside her with a frown, unsure of how to reply, while Mr. Hoopworth sopped around the table with a napkin, trying to keep the drink from spilling into his lap. Tom approached Lem and was prepared to haul him out, but his uncle bowed dramatically and left without encouragement.
“Lemuel Carver,” Tom said to the guests. “He hasn’t been himself since the pox took his wife.”
Bess suppressed her nerves, rushing to replenish Mr. Hoopworth’s smoak.
The lady blushed at Tom and said, “Here I was fearing Maimers, when it’s you I must be wary of!”
The door was still ajar and Scratch the cat ran in, a streak of ratty fur and scrabble-sharp claws. He hissed running past and sprinted to the kitchen, where they soon heard Nabby yelling strange, ancient curses.
Tom excused himself and said, “I’ll see about your food.”
He left them all in Bess’s care and hurried back to Nabby, who had cornered Scratch in the pantry with a poker from the hearth. Scratch hid behind a barrel, dodging her attack. A slick pink chicken neck quivered in his mouth.
Tom approached Nabby from behind and took the poker, unaware she’d grabbed the fire-heated iron with a cloth. The metal burned his hand, the poker clanked down, and Scratch darted past into the garden with his prize.
“I had him pinned!” Nabby said. “He took the best neck.”
Tom plunged his hand into a bucket of cold water. “I won’t have you killing cats in the kitchen.”
“The beast is not a cat. He was sent, like a curse, and he will give me no rest until—”
“You aren’t ruddy cursed any more than I am,” Tom said, examining his palm with the stings and the burn, and thinking of Lem and Sheriff Pitt, Bess and Molly and the Maimers, and the guests in need of food while the cook chased a cat.
He left Nabby muttering imprecations over the chicken beaks and walked out back. His copper had been tipped. The brew had doused the flames and pooled upon the ground, where the steaming mud revealed to Tom not the markings of a cat, but his uncle’s deep footprints leading to the trees.
* * *
The house of Dr. Benjamin Knox and his wife, Abigail, had sturdy clapboard walls and a high, peaked roof, and it stood upon a quarter-acre plot—mostly gardened—at the corner of Center and Milk Streets in the heart of the close-packed town.
Leafy vines covered the trellis up the side of the house. Molly had watched them grow from nothing during her weeks of convalescence and seen their tendrils uncoil right before her eyes. Spring in Root astonished her. Trees burst green, flowers leapt to bloom, and early fruits and berries looked ripe enough to pick. Breezy warmth, juicy vines—weeks ago, she’d hidden in a snowbound cabin. Had it only been a month since the winter disappeared?
Molly scanned the garden for renegade stalkers. These were short, sinuous weeds that uprooted themselves and crawled with reaching feelers to fatally suck the fluids of the garden’s stationary plants. Benjamin knelt in a shady patch of manure and clipped the newly grown feelers off a mass of writhing stalkers, but many others had spread throughout the garden overnight and had to be collected. They were not to be killed; once crippled and controlled, Benjamin had told her, stalkers clung together and eventually grew leaves of medicinal value. She spotted one now among the skinwort, allowed the feelers to twine around her wrist, and carried it back to Benjamin for pruning and replanting. He cut the feelers with his knife, took the weed, and smiled up at her.
Benjamin was Molly’s only friend in Root—her only friend at all—and for weeks he had kept her close in his care. They breakfasted and supped together, remaining in the garden or the house during the day and then conversing over tea in the parlor every evening. He enjoyed reading music and would often hum the tunes. He had tried for many years to learn the violin but suffered awkward fingers, which also caused him difficulty with writing and, he freely admitted, with stitches and incisions. But just as his medical knowledge compensated for his lack of dexterity, his passion for hearing music on the page compensated, in part, for his inability to play it.
One night the previous week, Benjamin had hummed a piece to himself and Molly had exclaimed, “That’s Flumat!”
Benjamin, much surprised, had double-checked the sheet.
“It is. It is indeed!” he said. “But how is it familiar?”
Molly almost blurted she had learned it from her brother, but she pinched herself fiercely on the wrist and said, “I have a memory for music. Like remembering a dream.”
He waited patiently for more, reading her expression like an unknown cadenza, and the floor appeared to shrink and draw their chairs nearer together. But on that particular evening, his wish to know her secrets paled before his delight at finding a companion, unheard-of in Root, who was acquainted with the music ever playing in his mind. From that night forth, they had spoken of Brondel, Hark, Riber, Frederini, and Gorelli, often reading the sheets together until Molly—much to Abigail’s displeasure—started to hum throughout the day as absentmindedly as Benjamin.
Neither of the Knoxes, Molly knew, believed her memory loss was genuine. Benjamin didn’t press, or rather pressed with gracious care. Abigail, however, came at her with knives.
Just that morning over breakfast, Molly was finishing her eggs when Abigail said, “I have another, if you’re hungry.”
“No, but thank you, Mrs. Knox.”
“A wasted egg. If you are finished with your breakfast, you may help me beat the rugs.”
“I continue to prescribe no strenuous activity after meals,” Benjamin said from behind a month-old newspaper he had borrowed from the tavern.
Abigail pursed her skinny lips—she seemed, in fact, to purse her whole body—and said as she cleared the table, “You encouraged Sarah Crook to go about her work,” referring to an elderly widow who had recently been kicked unconscious by a horse.
“A man in Grayport has invented an optical device,” Benjamin read, “that detects nascent fevers.”
“An honesty device would prove more useful,” Abigail replied.
Molly did her best to finish up her eggs. The hard-boiled yolk clung drily at her windpipe.
Benjamin folded the paper and stared at the wall, seeming to consider the materials of fever glasses. “There are numerous diverse manifestations of mental darkness,” he began.
“Including voluntary,” Abigail said, and promptly left the room.
Molly drank tea and dislodged the egg.
“I am crippling stalkers today,” Benjamin told her with a smile. “Would you like to assist me?”
“Yes,” she said, standing up and looking to the garden.
“She can cripple stalkers but cannot beat a rug,” came Abigail’s voice from two rooms away.
Indeed, Molly did feel strong enough to work when she was asked, or at the very least recovered from her most dramatic symptoms—the tenderness, swelling, and after-bleeding of her pregnancy, which she had struggled to conceal from Benjamin and Abigail. The air today soothed her like a childhood bath. Birds familiar and exotic swooped past, flashing colors: goldfinches, cardinals, something pearl, something blue. She pressed her hands into the earth, enjoying the fatness of the worms and the feel of healthy soil, and yet an emptiness remained, a hollowness of body and of life altogether, as if she had possessed a sixth sense and now, having lost it, found her customary senses too predictable and drab.
She captured the last of the runaway stalkers and watched Benjamin cripple and replant them. The weeds were calmer now, defeated—deprived, like herself, of their ability to flee, but at any rate safe within the good doctor’s care.
“They will root themselves again and grow more docile,” Benjamin said as he tamped the soil with his palms, “so long as they are kept sufficiently moist.”
“The rain will help,” Molly said.
Benjamin stood and cupped his eyes against the daylight. The sky looked enormous: high blue, bright as life, without a single passing cloud or any trace of wind. He tilted his head and asked, “Why do you say it will rain?”
“The blades of grass look sharper and they’re leaning to the west,” Molly said. “I noticed it a week ago, just before a storm.”
“Yes!” Benjamin said, clapping his hands and almost jigging. He rushed her with ebullience, eyeglasses flashing in the sun. “I have noted it a hundred times. The grass begins to point, the leaves raise their palms, and the white-throated sparrows sing a full octave higher.”
Molly had failed to note the sparrows but believed it was true. She had seen her fill of marvels since journeying to Floria, and even in a country so oddly unfamiliar, Root seemed a brighter cornucopia of wonders. Flower floods, walking weeds, multicolored air—of course the grass and birds heralded the storms.
“Does no one else notice?” Molly asked.
“The pointing grass?”
“The rarity and queerness.”
“Rare and queer! So it is! Most of the townspeople were born here and know of little else. That which travelers and transplants look upon as curious, the locals see as common as the hairs within their nostrils.”
“Are you a transplant?” she asked.
“I was born and breeched in Grayport.”
“Why is Root … different?”
“Why, indeed?” Benjamin replied. “I have notes and observations, legends and accounts, theories geographic, biologic, astronomic. Nowhere else, save perhaps the sea, are the mysteries of nature so abundantly in evidence, to say nothing of our more supernatural phenomena. The presence of ghosts is broadly accepted, and the local Elkinaki tell of a figure in the forest—the Colorless Man—who is strikingly similar to the devil of Scripture. Many in Root claim to have seen him as a thin, crooked shadow in the trees, in their dreams, or at the ends of their own benighted beds. Their stories are amazingly consistent, but how does one substantiate the wholly insubstantial?”
“Why are you whispering?” Molly asked.
“Abigail’s hearing is acute,” Benjamin said, leaning closer. “She tolerates my inquisitiveness to a degree, but she is devoutly Lumenist and considers my probing into spiritual matters prideful, even insolent to God.”
“But do you believe in such things? Ghosts and crooked shadow men?”
“Truth often hides within a skein of superstition. Nabby, the cook at the Orange, is a fount of numinous wisdom and is, herself, almost supernaturally long-lived … But that reminds me! The nyx is efflorescing.” Benjamin crossed the garden to a blossoming purple shrub. He cut a sprig with his knife and held it up to show her. “Nabby insists the petals, rubbed upon her eyelids, allow her to discover witches in disguise. It flowers only for a day—even now, the bloom is fading. I must take it to her at once or she will grouse at me the whole year through,” he said with a smile. “I think you may accompany me today. You have been cooped up enough and must be curious to see beyond the window of the parlor.”
“Yes!” Molly said, precisely as a leaden cloud, a forerunner of the approaching storm, dimmed the glaring sun.
She hadn’t seen Tom since his one brief visit to the house, but even three weeks later, he seemed to her as present as he had been that morning in the river when she floated in his arms, buoyant with his warmth. He was busy at the tavern, Benjamin had told her. She worried that he remembered her as cold, dead weight. But, oh!—how she would like to speak with him again, and to find in him, perhaps, another kind friend.
Abigail walked out the back door carrying Benjamin’s medical bag and said, “You’re wanted at the smithy. Luger crushed his foot.”
She had tied her hair back strictly so her forehead stretched, heightening her eyebrows. It gave her a look of supercilious attentiveness, recalling Mrs. Wickware, and yet her heron’s neck and poise were reminiscent of Frances, instilling in Molly a dual urge to hug her and recoil.
Benjamin took his bag and left for the smithy at once, his ruminative mood giving way to action, and after he was gone Abigail said to Molly, “There are several more stalkers mangling the pepperstem. I trust that you can cripple them yourself unassisted. When you’re finished, you may come inside and help me boil linen.”
She went inside without waiting for an answer, and Molly turned to the pepperstem, where three more stalkers had indeed been overlooked. It took her five minutes to extricate and replant them, and then she noticed the sprig of nyx that Benjamin had left behind, its small purple blossoms looking duller than before. She picked the flowers up and ran around the front of the house, but Benjamin had taken his horse and ridden out of sight.
Wind gusted up Center Street, swirling petticoats and dust, and there was thunder in the west and a smell of scoured tin. Gray-green clouds darkened and descended. The tavern stood in the distance on its hillock near the river. She could make it there and back in very little time; why not go alone? She wasn’t a prisoner, after all. Yet she doubted Abigail would allow her to leave instead of boiling linen, so she ran down the street without bothering to ask, hoping to deliver the nyx, say hello to Tom, and hurry back to the house before her absence was discovered.
She passed the common where the cows chewed the moist new grass. Next came the meetinghouse, bone white and fronted by a steeple, rarely used for several years—so Abigail had told her—since the local minister had been eaten by a catamount. A confidential air deepened off the common, partly from the overarching trees along the street but largely from the neatness and compactness of the houses. Most were single story, with a sharp peaked attic—a partial second level where inhabitants would sleep. All were simple in design, with pairs of windows at the front, central chimneys, white clapboards, and variously colored trim—crimson, green, indigo, buttercream, black.
However similar in style, they had character from age and many features of disfigurement. A window cloaked in ivy leaves fluttering with birds. A mangled weathervane, its arrow pointing up as if to blame. One small house, immaculately clean, had settled at an angle and tilted to the left, enough so that a ball might roll across its floor. Another, lacking shade, looked permanently parched. Still another looked warped from a lifetime of rain. Molly tried to imagine the differences inside—how it felt to look out instead of looking in.
Wind blew her east, down the street toward the river. Branches swayed and lightning flickered in the storm-heavy dark. Every citizen in sight was hurrying indoors and no one paid attention as she sprinted past, feeling weightless with the gusts shoving at her back.
She reached the end of Center Street and looked across the river, where the vast eastern forest seemed to spread out forever. Lightning lit the water and the woods stark white. Thunder cracked close, sounding like a pistol shot. She smelled the burnt powder, felt the tremor up her arm—only memories, but strong enough to make her think of Nicholas.
Ice-sharp rain needled at her face, and the wind bent the trees and whitecapped the river. She ran against the gusts, up a slope and sopping wet. She couldn’t see a thing through the broad sheets of rain. Hail fell in bursts, coating patches of the ground and pinging off her forehead and cleavage, hard as glass. It annihilated the sprig of nyx—nothing remained except for the stems—and Molly wiped her face and tried to see the tavern. A broad fork of lightning fractured overhead. She saw an old wooden sign swinging off a post: a faded orange, stuck with cloves. Beyond it, glowing windows.
Then a woman ran toward her from behind, drenched and laughing. She was young and unafraid and splashing up mud, a pretty silhouette emerging from the storm.
“Come on!” the woman said.
Molly took her hand. They hiked their skirts, ran beneath a sycamore tree, and raced toward the tavern’s storm-flickered door.