Molly and Nicholas disembarked the Cleaver on a cold November afternoon, having traveled from the warm Bruntish summer to the first light snow of Florian autumn.
Grayport, the oldest city on the continent, stood against the harbor like a miniature Umber, with the Arrowhead River flowing along the west and the wooded frontier encircling its borders. The city drew its name from a rare form of salt—a mineral in the bay that evaporated with the water and effloresced, like fuzzy crystal mold, anywhere the rain or mist carried it from the harbor. Drifts and pillars of the salt could be seen around the docks, trees stood gray and yet surprisingly survived, and the buildings looked far more aged than they were. Grime and patchwork were everywhere and gave the houses and the port a workmanlike appeal, as of structures roughly used and practically repaired. It was a lived-in city, now to be their home.
Despite Molly’s affection for Captain Veer and the crew, she said her goodbyes quickly—though tearfully with kind Mr. Knacker—and the siblings hurried off, eager to leave the ship’s stinking confines, the sailors’ questions about their prospects, and the pall of Mr. Fen’s unexplained death.
Nicholas’s health had largely rebounded but his strength, such as it was, had not entirely returned. Molly dragged their trunk, all they owned in the world, and scraped a trail in the clean inch of snow upon the wharf. She marveled at the firm, still planks beneath her feet, the unfamiliar gravity of ground that didn’t tip. The weather made the city beyond the docks as blurry as the ships in the white-gray harbor. The air was clean and cold, the smell of people, cod, rotten wood, and even her own unwashed body given freshness by the sea. There were tables of vegetables and fish; barrels, crates, and carts; cats and dogs and fearless gulls; drunks and raggedy children. Hawkers sized them up, some with offers of goods or greetings of dubious intent, but by and large they were no more regarded than anyone else around the dockyard.
Nicholas strode ahead and almost lost her in the crowd. Twice she said, “Nicholas,” and twice he didn’t turn. Molly dragged on, frazzled and alert, and saw her brother more than thirty paces off and never slowing. Wind razored through her cloak. The snow chilled her toes. She stamped her feet to warm them up and dropped the trunk, becoming an obstacle in the walkway and refusing to move another step, ignoring the grumbling passersby and balling up her fists.
“Jacob Smith!” she yelled.
Her brother stopped and turned. He made his way back with quick deliberate steps, a thin dark figure in the crosswind of flurries, as cool as she was hot, and maddeningly blank. Each was all the other had, and he had very nearly left her, merely to reinforce the lesson of their names.
“No one’s listening!” she said. “No one cares who we are!”
“We talked about this,” Nicholas replied.
“We’re here without a friend or anyplace to go, and you’re prepared to walk away because I called you by your name!” Her shout drew the hesitant attention of a constable, a portly man with fat silver buttons on his greatcoat. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas!” Molly yelled to prove her point. No one listened. No one cared. In fact, her overcooked dramatics turned the constable away, as she appeared to be a wife giving fire to her husband, something far too common to arouse the law’s suspicions.
Nicholas slumped and bowed his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her shoes.
The frailty of his will—an inner slump to match the outer, which she couldn’t remember seeing in her brother all his life—frostbit her hopes. They were equals now, tiny and encumbered by their freedom, as reliant on her wits as on Nicholas’s.
He tried to hide a cough. Molly’s stomach swooped and growled. She had caught a whiff of bread that made her ravenously hungry, and rather than console her brother in his doubt, she picked up the trunk and followed the aroma, keeping Nicholas behind her as she wove through the crowd.
The smell disappeared. She had possibly imagined it, but now that she was leading she was warmer, more determined, and she came upon a cart of plump frozen apples. The vendor was a man with pink protruding eyes, very like the snow-packed fruits he was selling. He stared with terrible acuity at everyone who passed, assessing whether they were customers or thieves, giving the same sharp look to well-dressed matrons as he did to wily children and a lean mongrel dog.
Molly hadn’t tasted apples since they’d sailed from Umber—only hardtack and salted meat and vegetables the likes of which she wouldn’t have fed to hogs. Nicholas stood beside her, out of breath and shivering hard. The apple seller glared.
Molly smiled and said, “Good day.”
“Good day,” the seller answered. “Rosy apple for you, miss?”
“I haven’t any money,” Molly said.
The seller blinked, or rather puckered at the eyes without closing up the lids. Molly opened the trunk and found a beaver cap mashed among the clothes.
“What are you doing?” Nicholas asked.
“I’m going to sing for coins.”
Her brother cocked a brow and said, “Molly. You cannot.”
It was true. She couldn’t sing. Even Frances had discouraged her—Frances, who encouraged her to dance, which Molly excelled at, and to practice speaking Rouge, which Molly learned with much complaint, and to swim and ride her horse and play the harpsichord with Nicholas: anything to keep her out of trouble with her father. Anything but sing. She could read a sheet, name a pitch, and memorize a tune, but though her speaking voice was sweet and bright, her singing voice was not.
“Torturous,” her father had called it. “Discordant,” said her brother. “It is a gift God withheld,” Frances gingerly suggested.
Molly would sooner win a coin juggling cats or eating fire. She set the cap upside down in the snow, ushered Nicholas behind her, and stood on the trunk. Then she swelled her chest and sang:
’Twas on the deep Eccentric
Midst extraordinary gales
A sailor tumbled overboard
Among the sharks and whales!
He vanished in a blink
So headlong down went he
And went out of sight
Like a wrinkle of light
In the darkness of the sea!
“God’s blood!” a passing trader said, covering his ears. The fishmongers stared, openmouthed as mackerel. A rope beater paused in the beating of his rope.
We lowered a boat to find his corpse
And mourn whate’er we could
When up he bobbed and split the waves
Like a buoyant piece of wood!
The apple seller tried to speak but choked and started hacking. Two women carrying baskets, who’d been coming toward the cart, frowned at Molly haughtily and walked the opposite way. Others shuffled off and kept their distance on the dock until the apple man and half the neighboring merchants were abandoned.
“Cut that out!”
“You’re killing business!”
“And me ears!”
“Scat, be off!”
My fellows, said the sailor,
Do not grieve for me
I’m married to a mermaid
In the sweet Eccentric Sea!
The apple seller grasped at her with cold, bony hands. His eyes were wider now, and raw, and threatening to pop. A burly man, slimy-aproned with a foul stink of fish, took her other arm and forced her off the trunk, saying, “Tha’s enough now. You’s injuring me finer sensibilities.”
Molly kept singing over all their protestations. A bearded sailor with a sad, flat face produced a copper, dropped it into the cap, and said, “Buy yourself a muzzle.”
Molly stopped and took the cap and looked for Nicholas, who’d vanished. In the sudden lack of song, she heard the hiss of falling snow. She curtsied to the vendors and left the dock, dragging the trunk.
Nicholas met her beside a dray at the start of the city proper, holding four grand apples he had stolen undetected. Molly laughed and flashed the coin. Nicholas grinned and bowed.
They put the apples in the trunk, all but one that Molly ate as they walked the narrow, mazy streets of center Grayport. The closeness of the buildings lent both snugness and constraint to the city, a sense that everyone was safe but too close packed, like people on a ship with overstuffed cabins. Opportunity was everywhere but so was competition, and although it seemed a perfect place for runaways to hide, it also seemed a place where someone vulnerable could vanish.
Molly and Nicholas were jostled by people who seemed fresher and more cavalier than the citizens of Umber. It was freedom, Molly thought, from the governance of Bruntland, a mother country too far away to fully parent. Everyone they saw showed vitality and purpose. Even the drunks and beggars seemed to know where they were going.
The siblings spent their copper on a hearty loaf of bread. They tore it into chunks and chewed it as they walked, but their hours of discovery were terribly fatiguing, and they could linger only so long in shops or public houses without a show of money. The snow eventually stopped but the temperature plummeted in the late-day sun. Dragging the trunk had worn Molly out and Nicholas was wan. They came to a tavern at the outskirts of the city, where the streets petered out to show the wilderness beyond. The sky was bloody wool. A lamplighter passed, igniting salt-encrusted lanterns, and the streets looked cozy in the hard-biting cold. They heard a fiddle and a hornpipe playing in the tavern, smelled the meat and pies and biscuits, watched the patrons come and go.
Nicholas took Molly’s hand and led her to a church. It was tiny, gray and black with a tall sharp steeple. They went inside and huddled in a corner in the dark. Molly wiped her eyes, looking up beyond the rafters. Nicholas thought and thought, staring at the floor.
* * *
They lived by hook or crook for the first few days, stealing what they could and begging for the rest, until they each found employment and rented a small, drafty flat in the rougher section of Grayport’s central district. By midwinter, Molly had worked as a scullery maid, a seamstress, and a serving girl in three separate taverns. She had been fired from every position for cheek and ungovernability, and had been forced to start again each time without references.
One evening after a long, futile search for new employment, Molly walked to the Customs House, a noble brick building, four stories high, with a newly added portico and a clock tower overlooking the waterfront. Nicholas had found clerical work there, thanks to his aptitude with figures and his fluency in several languages: qualities of worth in a city with so many foreign sailors, so many ledgers and restrictions. It was a position Nicholas loathed but one he had to keep; even when Molly held a job, they could barely pay the rent.
The sun had set on all but the face of the Customs House clock, and Molly paced the shadowy docks and gazed across the sea. She had a vision of her father, well-attired, in his study.
News of the Bread Riot Massacre had arrived from Umber in early winter. Seventeen dead, dozens more wounded. Inquests were held and protests were staged, but ultimately the rioters were demonized, having instigated the bloodshed with countless acts of violence, theft, and vandalism. To stabilize the peace, fixed prices were enforced once more throughout the markets and Umber carried on, bruised but not destroyed. General Bell, so recently the nation’s savior in war, was generally portrayed as a hero and a victim. Molly didn’t know whether he had remained in Worthington Square. For all she knew, the home she’d come to miss was nonexistent.
She left the wharf at nightfall and met Nicholas at the Customs House door. Her appearance there surprised him for only a moment. Then he said with leaden certainty, “Another fruitless day. Perhaps it’s you, and not employers, who are being too selective.”
“I can always be a laundress. How I’d love to be a governess,” she said, feigning hope.
Nicholas wounded her with laughter. “Who would trust you with their linens, let alone their children? The streets would soon be full of underboiled urchins.”
They began walking home through the tight-knit crowd in a city still foreign, still coldly unfamiliar. Little coin and many worries were the whole of their existence. Molly glowered at a coffeehouse stuffed with rosy people. Salty gray slush leaked through her shoes.
A fellow with a long crooked nose bumped her shoulder.
“Excuse me, miss!” he said. “I wasn’t looking, thousand pardons.”
When she turned around to answer, he had blended with the crowd.
“Open your cloak,” Nicholas said, reaching for her collar.
“What are you doing? Nicholas, stop.”
He pried apart her hands, saw her throat, and narrowed his eyes.
“Wait for me at home,” he said.
Before she understood or could summon a reply, Nicholas had walked away and she was suddenly alone.
She called his name and followed him, but no—he’d turned a corner. Then a horse was in her way and she was forced to move aside, and it was only upon refastening her cloak that she discovered her locket was gone. The only valuable thing she owned, with Nicholas’s tooth! She hurried through the streets, unsure of where to go, less concerned about the locket than she was about her brother as he chased a practiced thief to God knew where. What if there were others? Didn’t thieves have dens? What if Nicholas were cornered in an unlit yard, bludgeoned in a house, and never seen again?
For almost two hours she checked the side roads, marketplace, and docks, all the time with billowing dread that she had lost him altogether. How would she survive without a job or ready money, having no place to live and no means of sailing back?
“Rotten spoiled girl!” she said, upbraiding herself for selfishness and drawing wary looks.
When the cold shrank her down and the search was clearly useless, she returned to their icy flat, shivering and despondent. Watchmen rarely patrolled their part of the city and the streets were barely lit. She braved a shortcut between a pair of derelict houses, where the weeds were frozen dead and snagged her skirt, and climbed the creaking outdoor stairs to their door, relieved she had a key but jealous of the landlady’s late mutton supper. Molly paused a moment, savoring the wonderful aroma. She considered going down and begging for a plate, but how could she indulge herself with Nicholas in danger? So she turned the frozen key to face the dark, spartan flat.
She opened the door to heat and light. A lantern burned, the iron stove was full of burning coals, and Nicholas sat at the table with a roasted chicken, a golden loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine he had opened but not yet poured.
She rushed to hug him in his chair and he was warm, very warm. He backed her off and rubbed her hands to foster circulation. Molly cried in her relief, and laughed, and said in anger, “I’ve been searching half the city, thinking you were dead, and here you are with dinner! O, you hardhearted fiend!”
“I said to wait at home,” he answered, unperturbed.
She called him many things and cursed him many ways. Nicholas took her cloak and stood her at the stove. He poured her a cup of wine—they had tin instead of glass—and Molly gulped it down with no awareness of its flavor.
Nicholas held her locket up. It dangled by its ribbon, delicate and twisting, glinting in the light.
“Oh!” Molly said. “But how—”
“I used persuasion.”
Molly stood with jellied legs, recalling Mr. Fen.
“Is he jailed? Is he—”
“Free. Not to trouble us again.”
He handed her the locket, poured his own cup of wine, and sipped it with attention, savoring the vintage.
* * *
Two days later, Molly sat alone in the flat mending a tear in Nicholas’s only spare shirt. She daydreamed of Frances, who had taught her how to sew and had been doing so herself, in the little green room of the country manor, on the evening Lord Bell had announced her dismissal. Molly longed to write her letters but Nicholas wouldn’t allow it. What if Frances’s employers intercepted such a letter? What if Lord Bell had asked for their assistance, hoping to discover the location of his children? Molly understood but would have risked it anyway, and she had spent a quarter hour recalling the sound of Frances’s voice, and how she used to dab her nose with a monogrammed handkerchief, when someone ascended the outdoor stairs and knocked upon the door of the flat.
No one ever knocked. No one visited at all. Nicholas wasn’t due for at least another hour, having planned to finish his day at the Customs House and inquire after a printmaking job across the city. In Molly’s reverie, the daylight had fallen to the dark, and now the person at the door was playing with the lock. She stood and grabbed the shovel used for cleaning out the stove. It was iron, square-headed with a reassuring heft. She raised it when the lock and then the door gently opened.
In walked a stranger, magisterial and tall, and she might have cracked his skull if not for his ebony skin.
Rich, Molly thought. From the bright Aquatic Islands.
Aquarians were a prominent minority in Grayport, hailing from a small, wealthy country in the Solar Ocean. Molly had seen them often in the city that winter, riding carriages or walking from the harbor to the Customs House. Not every Aquarian was affluent, but they were foreign and imposing and possessed of native pride. One assumed a higher pedigree and generally the assumption was correct; Molly—poor and plain—was outside their sphere.
“Good evening, Mrs. Smith,” the stranger said, doffing his hat with a bow and exposing his head to the shovel. “My apologies for entering so. I knocked and no one answered.”
He addressed her with the slow, melodic accent of his country. It was a voice that took its time without being dull, rather like a cello at a comfortable andante. He was sensibly dressed for winter in a bearskin hat, knee-high boots, and a fur-shouldered coat that added to his broadness. Molly backed away, speechlessly confused, until the stove felt near enough to scald her derrière.
“My name is Kofi Baa,” he said. “I am a shipowner residing here in Grayport. Your husband suffered injuries in aid of me tonight. A hired man is carrying him up even now.”
Molly dropped the shovel. Kofi Baa stepped aside, untroubled by the clang, and she had nearly reached the stairs when a short, swarthy man carried Nicholas inside.
“Jacob!” Molly cried.
Nicholas smiled coyly. His carrier had the misshapen nose and knuckles of a boxer, but he placed her brother upright in a chair as gently as he might have placed a child. Nicholas’s forearm was crudely wrapped and bloody.
“What happened?” Molly asked, kneeling at his feet.
Nicholas gave her a look as if to say: Best behavior.
Kofi handed the swarthy man a large silver coin and said, “We thank you for your efforts.”
The man bowed and left.
Kofi closed the door and said to Molly, “Please allow me to explain so your husband may collect himself. This evening I followed a familiar shortcut after business at the Customs House, unwise of me in retrospect, and found myself at knifepoint, alone beyond the docks, at the mercy of a brigand who demanded all I had. He seemed inclined to use the knife when your husband, silent as a grave cat, tackled him and grappled with the man upon the ground. I admit to being startled by the unexpected rescue. By the time I gained my wits, the villain had escaped. Your husband broke his ankle and was slashed along the arm.”
Tackled, Molly thought, and grappled on the ground? If not for the sincerity of Kofi Baa’s telling, she’d have laughed at the absurdity. Her brother in a brawl!
“I used my handkerchief to bind the wound,” Kofi said, “and summoned a passing jack, just departed, to assist us.”
“But you must see a doctor!” Molly told her brother.
Nicholas touched her cheek, very like a spouse.
“I have already sent for one,” Kofi said. “He will be ably stitched and splinted.”
“Thank you,” Nicholas told him. “Molly, don’t be frightened. We could all use a drink, if I may trouble you to pour.”
“Yes, of course,” Molly mumbled, suddenly aware of the flat’s crooked squalor. It was tiny and dim with cracked plaster walls, a very low ceiling with a fur of old salt, and no furniture aside from the table, chairs, and two lumpy mattresses positioned near the stove.
Molly uncorked their one bottle of wine and poured it into a pair of cups—the only two they owned—for Nicholas and their guest. Kofi recognized the shortage and said, “Formality should never do disservice to a lady.”
He handed her his cup, gave the second cup to Nicholas, bowed to each in turn, and drank directly from the bottle. Then he encouraged Molly to sit while he stood beside the stove, making easy conversation while they waited for the doctor.
Nicholas spoke of the Customs House—small talk, at first, to pass the empty minutes but increasingly precise as Kofi asked questions. They spoke of trade with New Solido, of markets still reeling from the war against the Rouge. Nicholas clarified a thorny regulation concerning the export of lumber and shared a loophole, little known but perfectly legal, that would save Kofi a great deal of trouble.
“Once again I am indebted for your help,” Kofi said. “You must allow me to perform some service in return.”
Here, Molly thought, was the chance she had prayed for. But Nicholas looked abashed, showing a strange combination of humility and pride, and seemed about to decline when they were interrupted by the arrival of the doctor.
He was a tightly wound, squinty little man of roughly sixty, brisk in social niceties but masterful in skill. Molly and Kofi watched as he examined Nicholas’s injuries—the ankle was not so badly broken, but the cut was rather deep—and her brother closed his eyes and went to a place of abstract thought, wincing only slightly, as the doctor sewed his arm with a long, arced needle.
Molly warmed to Kofi. He was gentle and expansive and accorded her the mannerly attention of a suitor. To lie to his face seemed grossly disrespectful. Nevertheless she did, telling the well-practiced story she had used since the Cleaver, because although they had meant to live as brother and sister in the city, their artificial marriage had gained a life of its own. They had foolishly presented themselves to their landlady as husband and wife, and it was she who had introduced Nicholas to a clerk she knew in the Customs House—a clerk who found the married “Jacob Smith” a good position. Now a mounting house of cards was built upon the lie, and so she told Kofi Baa that her parents were deceased; that Jacob, born to affluence, had married her against his family’s wishes; and that they had sailed for Grayport to start a life upon their own terms, however great the struggle.
Kofi, too, had sailed away from home when he was young.
“My great mistake was pride,” he said, widening his stance. “Refusing any aid, I almost starved when I arrived. But certain forms of charity are not the same as pity. Had I not been offered help and seen the opportunity, I might have sailed home, sorely beaten by the world.”
The doctor finished sewing Nicholas’s arm. He secured the fractured ankle, first with a bandage and then with a wooden splint, clad in leather, that fit together as a two-piece shell around the leg. Nicholas thanked him, as did Molly, but the doctor packed his instruments and seemed not to hear, the way a joiner might ignore a newly finished chair. He laid a cheap wooden crutch in Nicholas’s lap.
Kofi escorted him out and paid him on the stairs, and then he walked back in and clasped Nicholas’s hand.
“I must be off,” Kofi said, “but this will not be forgotten.” The timbre of his voice warmed Molly’s bones. “I will see you at the Customs House tomorrow afternoon, when again”—here he bowed—“I will ask for your assistance.”
“I look forward to it,” Nicholas said. “Will you be safe walking home?”
“My father used to say, ‘Fools are luckier than cowards.’” He kissed Molly’s hand between her first and second knuckles. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Smith.”
“You as well, Mr. Baa.”
She saw him out, closed the door, and waited until his footsteps were safely off the stairs. When a very long sigh failed to dissipate the tension, Molly mussed her hair like an uncouth child. She kicked her shoes across the floor and strode toward her brother, who was sliding off the chair, peaked and depleted.
Molly gawked at him and said, “What on earth just happened?”
“Fortune paid a visit,” Nicholas replied.
* * *
Nicholas studied his cast and seemed amazed by what had occurred. He explained to Molly that he had been delayed an extra hour at the Customs House and left after dark. Eager to reach the printer who had advertised a job, he took a shortcut between the storehouses at the far end of the dockyard and noticed, near a shadowy stack of crates, a well-dressed man being cornered by a thief. Discovering the crime triggered something primal. He ran swiftly and tackled the assailant without thought, emboldened, he supposed, by his capture of the locket thief several days before.
“It galls me,” Nicholas said, “that rogues play with gold while you and I, of better character, sup with wooden spoons. I vowed in Umber that I wouldn’t let us fall to disadvantage. Tonight, as with the locket thief, I exercised my strength.”
His ankle had been broken in the fight but he hadn’t felt the cut, not until the assailant—much surprised—fled for safety and left Nicholas and Kofi on their own. Molly visualized the scene but struggled to digest it. The knife could just as easily have plunged through Nicholas’s heart. She made him promise to desist from fighting all the city’s villains, and late in the night, once he was asleep, she wondered what she would have done in his place. It seemed inevitable that dangers would continue to beset them, that eventually she’d have to face a threat on her own.
Nicholas hobbled to work the following day and returned that night with extraordinary news. True to his word, Kofi Baa had met him at the Customs House, not only with additional questions about lumber and fur exportation, but with a great many questions about Nicholas himself.
Mr. Baa controlled numerous ventures in Grayport, among them a translation office whose sole employee had recently died of gangrene. Reliable translation of foreign correspondence was increasingly vital with so many thriving markets and overseas contracts, and upon determining that Nicholas did not desire a future in the Customs House, Kofi offered him not only the dead man’s position but also the newly vacant quarters over the office. The salary was modest but the rent would be waived; the office was located in the better part of the city, only minutes from the best markets; and Nicholas, so often ill, could go to work on bitter days simply by walking downstairs. To quell the fear of charity, Kofi explained that Nicholas’s erudition, polyglotism, and attention to detail suited him ideally to the venture’s clientele. That Molly spoke Rouge, and was at least passably fluent in Violinish and Solidon, was an added piece of luck. She could translate, too, and copy critical documents.
Nicholas accepted. In two days’ time, he and Molly were living in well-furnished rooms, purchasing their first new clothes since arriving in Grayport, and dining on wholesome food before a clean, cheerful hearth. Molly took a bath and overslept in downy blankets. Nicholas got to work, examining Kofi’s backlog of foreign correspondence and leaving Molly alone to explore the wintry city, now with money in her pocket, and discover that it wasn’t so hostile after all.
Merchants spoke to her and smiled, sensing she could pay. The falling snow was lovelier, reminding her of warmth in their sweetly settled home, and even the taverns felt safer when she ducked inside, escaping the cold because she could, and sat before a fiddler with a cup of hot chocolate.
But her freedom was withheld as soon as she embraced it. Nicholas began to focus on Kofi Baa’s most pressing contracts and letters, leaving Molly to translate the rest and mind the public office, a quiet brown room that faced the vibrant street. There she sat for hours, day after day. She greeted customers and accepted their paperwork and payments. Messages of particular sensitivity were handled by her brother, who made her translate and copy the most flavorless, abstruse documents to and from Rouge. How she would have liked to wander in the snow—to make a friend, climb a tower, ride a horse beyond the city!
The doldrums only deepened once the office was established and her brother devoted himself to more delicate work in the rear parlor. Kofi Baa had benefited greatly from Nicholas’s varied expertise, and he began referring colleagues with questions about shipping regulations, tariffs, and taxes. Her brother read day and night, bolstering his knowledge, and by winter’s end, not a day was passing without several respectable businesspersons coming to Nicholas for advice or arbitration—some professional, some private, none of which he spoke about specifically with Molly.
“A property dispute beyond the purview of the courts,” he might say, or “Familial concerns,” or “Sensitive relations.” He was something like a lawyer, or a scholar, or a minister, and those who visited the office and met him in the parlor entered nervously, or grimly, and departed much at ease.
One night, Molly woke in the dark and sat up in bed. It was summer by then and depressingly hot. The overripe city rarely freshened with the breeze, which wafted from the west instead of from the sea so that its greatest effect was to move the smell of humid dung, sweat, and fishy remains from one stifling district to another. Molly’s window was open, and although it was late and quiet on the street, she felt that she’d been woken by an unfamiliar sound. Her senses twitched and flickered, and her heartbeat thumped, as if she’d woken from a nightmare and parts had followed her out.
“Nicholas,” she whispered to his door across the room.
She heard a sound downstairs: someone moving in the office.
“Nicholas!” she said.
The sound below her ceased. Had her voice carried down? She couldn’t leave the bed and risk creaking on the floor. Before deciding what to do, she heard the telltale hinges of the office door, so she knelt upon the bed and leaned toward the window, peeking down with only her forehead and eyes above the sill.
She saw a man leave the office, just below her in the dark. He shut the door behind him and stood for a moment, facing south and showing the back of his head. He had black sweaty hair and too-tight breeches, and when he turned and started north, Molly knew him at once by his long, crooked nose.
She sprang from bed and opened the door to Nicholas’s room. He wasn’t there. Molly wavered in her panic, considering first a cry of “Help!” to summon a constable or watchman but afraid, at such an hour, it would only bring the locket thief back toward the house.
She hurried down the darkened stairs, unable to see the steps, and opened the door to the lower parlor. There were shadows on the floor from a single lit candle. For an instant every one of them was Nicholas’s body—there a foot, there his head, there a small pool of blood—and finding they were nothing only heightened Molly’s dread. He had to be in the office, where the locket thief had been. She crossed the parlor to the door, and then she braced herself and paused, hand heavy on the knob, with a great dull wedge in the middle of her chest.
She opened the door and shrieked. Nicholas stood before her.
He wasn’t a bit surprised and must have heard her coming, and she wondered why he hadn’t called out to reassure her.
“What are you doing?” Molly asked, breathy and aggressive. “He was here, I saw him leave! The locket thief!”
“Molly—”
“Tell the truth!”
Was it worry or a thin blade of fear in his eyes? She grabbed his arms and felt them stiffen in his loose silk sleeves. His expression did the opposite, softening within but staying hard upon the surface.
“Don’t concern yourself,” he said.
“Are we in danger? Did he threaten you?” she asked. “Was it him?”
He stepped toward her as she held his arms and backed her into the parlor. He had strengthened over the summer and was harder to resist. Humidity engulfed them and the candlelight throbbed.
“Trust me,” Nicholas said. “I have everything in hand.”