Later that night, after everyone had gone, Molly found Tom alone in the taproom. He sat at a table near the window and watched a shower of rain. A lone, stumpy candle in the middle of the room was scarcely bright enough to qualify as illumination, and the saturated heat was like the air beneath a blanket.
“How’s Bess?” he asked.
“Sleeping,” Molly said.
So were Ichabod and Nabby and the handful of travelers. She flapped the front of her gown to ventilate her breasts and grazed her left nipple. That was all it took to overwhelm her senses and she wobbled off center, like a pudding set aquiver. It astonished her to be so affected. After last winter, she’d believed the urge had died but here it was, resurrected like an everlasting body.
Molly stood beside Tom with her belly near his ear. She reached toward his tied-back hair without his noticing.
“Why was she talking to Lucas?” he asked.
“She’s been saving her money for fiddle lessons.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I’m teasing you,” she said, and then she did grab his ponytail, squeezing it and giving it the gentlest of tugs. “She fancies him.”
“I didn’t know that, either,” Tom said without turning.
Molly released his hair, disappointed that her boldness hadn’t prompted a reaction.
“I reckon Lem scared him off,” Tom said.
“Then he wasn’t much of a man.”
“Most men have the sense to keep clear of a woman with that much trouble clinging to her skirts.”
“Not you.”
“It’s one of my reckless virtues,” Tom said, looking up at her with nothing like virtue in his eyes, as if her skirts, then and there, were smoldering off her body. Molly drew a chair and sat beside him, knee to thigh.
“What will you do about Bess and Lem?”
Tom sighed. “There isn’t much I can do. I won’t send her off, but neither will I fight him outright unless I have to. They’re all the family I got, at least around here.”
“Your brother at sea—”
“Winward,” Tom said, smiling just to say it. “People call him Win. He was smart enough to leave and not look back.”
“Don’t you love Root?”
“I do. I love the Orange. There’s a history to home, but every history has hurts. Ever seen the gash on the outside door?”
Molly nodded. She had probed it with her finger only last week.
“That’s a hatchet cut,” he said. “I could show you seven bullet holes peppering the walls. Bloodstains from accidents and childbirth and fights. A quarter of the tavern caught fire one year. You can still see the burns on the underlying frame.”
She knew the scorched wood, a few of the bullet holes, and many of the stains, some of which she’d made with her own spilled blood. She knew the black glove nailed to the parlor wall and the sinister face lurking in the hearth stones. She also knew the exact number of wishbones hanging in the taproom, the hidden panel in the upstairs hall, and the cobwebbed passage that led to the secret part of the cellar. She didn’t know most of the stories behind the details, and considering how often she discovered something new—a roughly carved symbol, or the window outside that didn’t correspond to any known room—it seemed the Orange had the history of many homes combined.
Tom fell as silent as the furniture around them.
“How did your parents die?” she asked.
“You don’t know this yet?”
There were countless questions Molly had withheld throughout the summer, especially those related to her regular companions. She knew nothing about Ichabod’s muteness, little of Benjamin and Abigail’s past, and almost none of Tom’s life aside from what she saw directly. Having secrets of her own made her hesitant to ask.
“You know about the war,” Tom said.
Molly nodded. She knew it verse and chorus from the papers back in Umber, when she used to study the articles for news about her father.
Tom looked out the window instead of at her, giving an oddly distant feel to everything he told her.
“I served for three years in the army and wound up at Fort Pine,” he said. “That’s fifty leagues north of here, mostly wilderness except for the odd settlement or two. The Rouge had found a passage from the sea to the northern Antler. They meant to run ships from the mountains to the Arrowhead River, straight down to Grayport—it would have won the war. We were a skeleton division holding Fort Pine, barely enough to man the cannons. Our captain had died of knotgut, our food and ammunition were low, and the Kraw had hemmed us in so we couldn’t send for reinforcements. We knew the Rouge were coming, and we knew General Bell and his men were only a two-day march to the west, completely unaware—”
Molly bumped his leg, rising from her chair. She had mostly held her breath since he mentioned Fort Pine, but on hearing her father’s name, she walked toward the bar to gather her composure.
“What?” Tom asked.
“I thought you’d like a drink,” she said, thankful of the dark.
Of course the bar was locked. She walked back to get his key and he was sitting there, perplexed, seeming worried he had rambled and annoyed that she was up.
“I want to hear it all and mean to settle in,” she said.
Molly took the key and unlocked the bar. Tom waited, silhouetted by a quick flash of lightning while she poured them each a rum, drank her own, and poured again. The heat felt thicker at the level of her head. She took the glasses back and sat. Her legs were made of wax.
“You needed reinforcements but the Kraw had hemmed you in,” she said. “What are they like?”
“The Kraw?” he asked, holding his rum and leaning away from her exaggerated interest. “Hard,” he said. “Sharp. Like a thicket made of knives. The warriors are women.”
“People say they aren’t human.”
“They’re human,” Tom said. “I admit to having wondered. The Elkinaki say the Kraw are so connected to the forest, they sicken when they leave it, like uprooted trees.”
Tom took a drink and swished before he swallowed.
“They were all around the fort, and fearsome good at hiding. A man could try to run and get a message through to Bell, but even with sharpshooters clearing the way, it was more than likely suicide. A week before the siege, I’d gotten word my mother had died of fever. My father was already dead, and there had been rumors that my brother’s ship had sunk at Point Dureef. I suppose I fell victim to despair,” Tom said. “But it felt like rage. I hated the Rouge for starting the war. I hated the Kraw for pinning us in. I hated General Bell for camping so close and not knowing how desperate we had gotten at the fort. I put it all on him. I wanted him to know.
“I left at first light, before the sun was rightly up. There was a secret way out, a hidden door that got me into shrubs around the fort. The forest smelled rank and overgrown, like a poison. All I meant to do was run until I died. I took off straight toward the tree line, sprinting through the clearing with a knife and two pistols. The Kraw appeared out of nowhere, shadows in the shadows. I shot the first, missed the second, dropped the guns, and ran as fast as I could. An arrow hit my leg. I broke it off with the point still buried in my thigh. A few of them chased me. They were silent—it was eerie how they moved. Sharpshooters hit them from the fort and cleared the way, but one of the shooters wasn’t so sharp and hit me in the shoulder, right before I made it to the trees. The bullet spun me and I landed in a patch of high ferns, with the Kraw it should have killed coming right behind me.
“The fall dazed me and she caught me—I must have looked dead. I didn’t see her but I smelled her, and the strange thing about it was she smelled like home. Exactly like this,” Tom said, putting his palms upon the table, close to Molly’s own. “Smoky and familiar. I imagined I was here. I felt her leaning over me and thought about my mother. Then she tried to scalp me—sliced a quarter way back before I stabbed her in the gut. I didn’t feel her knife until her body fell away.”
He tipped his forehead down for Molly to examine. She ran her fingers over the scar, slightly crooked, slightly raised, and moved the skin upon the bone with a fascinated shiver. She wondered if he’d ever let another person touch it.
“Did you feel your own skull?”
“I don’t remember,” Tom said.
He traced the scar with his thumb, with his elbows on the table and a thin line of sweat running from his temple.
“I left the fort ready to die,” he said. “The pain changed my mind. So off I went with a bullet in my shoulder, an arrowhead buried in my leg, and so much blood in my face I couldn’t wipe it off. I heard another round of shots—a few more Kraw the sharpshooters hit—and then I was clear of the worst and running in the forest. Eventually I stopped and tore my sleeves to make a bandage so my scalp wouldn’t keep flapping open as I ran. When I made it to Bell’s encampment, I wouldn’t drink or sit until I delivered the message in person. I met the general in a tent, gave him the letter, and collapsed. I gathered he was powerfully impressed by my arrival.”
Tom gulped his rum so unslakably and firmly, he seemed prepared to swallow the glass or crush it in his hand. He stood and opened a window. Fresher, cooler air wafted in and gave them breath. Molly watched him sit again. His weight creaked the chair. She could still feel his scar like blisters on her fingers.
“I slept for three days and woke to news that General Bell had marched to Fort Pine,” he said. “The Rouge sailed down, expecting no resistance, and were blown to smithereens. It turned the war in Bruntland’s favor. Bell visited me later and gave me a commendation.”
“What did you think of him?” she asked.
“An angry man. Rigid. Like he wasn’t used to anything but standing up straight. He admired my wounds. He even touched my scalp the way you touched my scar. We shared a bottle of port and talked about the war, but something in his being there, something in his crispness or his confidence enraged me. I tried to disillusion him. I talked about my mother, how I’d left the fort assuming, even wishing, I’d be killed. I thought he’d be disgusted and consider it unsoldierly. But then he talked about his wife, who had died giving birth, and his son and daughter, who were waiting back in Umber.”
“What did he say?” Molly whispered.
“He said he hoped his own death would inspire them to greatness—only nothing quite as bloody. We toasted to their health.”
Tom fell into a reverie, accompanied it seemed by the spirit of his mother, and the voice of General Bell, and the old glass of port. In the hour when her father had been toasting to her health, she’d been reveling with Nicholas and toasting their ascension. Was it possible the same was happening again—that her father, worlds away, was thinking of her now, never dreaming what fates he had driven her and Nicholas to follow?
“After the war,” Tom said, “people saw me different. They asked for my advice, came to me for help. They put me at the head of Root’s militia. More than a few suggested I run for office. And it burned James Pitt, who’d joined another regiment and served without injury or recognition. No fault of his own. He’d been willing to fight. The war played out a different way, that was all, and he marched back home the same as when he left.”
“It’s small of him to hate you for it,” Molly said.
“He hated me before. The war deepened the trench.”
He stood again, fetched the tobacco rope hanging near the hearth, and laid it on the table. She watched him cut coin-sized disks off the rope and dice them very finely with his knife while he spoke.
“Pitt’s father used to own this place when we were boys,” Tom said. “Our mothers were friends. They knew each other in Grayport before the Pitts moved here and built the tavern for their home and livelihood. There was need of a tavern here, but Mr. Pitt had made his money in shipping and didn’t know a lick about brewing. He had contempt for most of the locals, too, which didn’t help business, and a run of bad luck. Part of the roof collapsed one winter. The storeroom burned. He fell into debt, was facing jail and worse from some of his creditors, so he took their savings back to Grayport and gambled on a high-risk shipment overseas, right as the Rouge and pirates started playing havoc with the trade routes. Even if the shipment got through, he needed half a year to see a big enough return.”
Tom returned the tobacco rope to its hook. He carried the candle from the middle of the room and set the pewter holder on the table. Then he gently stuffed his pipe, inverted the bulb over the flame, and drew until it crackled. Molly squinted at the candle after sitting in the dark, enjoying how the light seemed to hold them in its aura.
“Mr. Pitt’s wife confided in my mother, who sympathized and wanted to help. My parents had talked about moving to Root. There were opportunities here—less competition than the city, cheap land. My father had made some money as a brewer in the city. He offered to buy the tavern—temporarily, to keep it from the creditors—and get it into shape while the Pitts stayed in Grayport to settle their affairs. Mr. Pitt agreed. He took the proceeds and paid down a number of his debts. The plan was when the shipment made Mr. Pitt’s fortune, my father would sell the tavern back and be paid an extra sum for his assistance, more than enough to settle our family permanently in Root … But you have to understand,” Tom said gravely, “no one, including Mr. Pitt himself, honestly expected that shipment to succeed.”
Molly’s heart thumped warmer from the rum she had drunk. She breathed the pipe smoke, a fragrance she had come to adore, and listened with the dread and fascination of a child.
“My father called this place home as soon as we arrived,” Tom said. “He rebuilt the storeroom, hired Nabby as a cook, and brewed better beer than Root had ever tasted. He was one of the first to roast smoaknuts. He learned it from the Elkinaki. People liked him. By the end of the winter, the tavern was a popular place, and when the road cleared in spring, he started making money.”
Tom smoked to calm down, gazing at the ember, but he coughed as if he’d never smoked a pipe and couldn’t take it. Another pulse of lightning came without sound and the rain dripped softly from the eaves above the window.
“The shipment got through,” Tom said slowly. “Mr. Pitt was in the black. But people in Root liked the tavern just the way it was. So did my father. When the Pitts returned from Grayport prepared to buy it back, my father wouldn’t sell. Mr. Pitt was furious. He built this place, he said. ‘And wrecked it,’ said my father. ‘It was me who built it up again and saved you from the creditors.’ Mr. Pitt returned to Grayport and fought it with a lawyer, but the law stood against him. There was nothing he could do. So he rode back to Root, brought a pistol, and shot my father dead in front of thirty-seven witnesses.”
He said the word “dead” with a visible deflation. Molly dug her fingernails fiercely into her knees.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Ten,” Tom said, cradling his pipe so his hand seemed to smoke. “I was back behind the bar, tapping a keg of ale. My brother was in the stables. Our father made us work like any other hands. We groused a lot but loved the way he treated us like men. I was struggling with the tap and looked to him for help. He was five paces off, standing near my mother with his back toward the door. I suppose he looked like me—the way I look now. My mother was pretty but frail. She had a crooked leg from birth. It made her stand with her right side lower than her left, but she learned to tilt her head a certain way in compensation. It made her look thoughtful, like the tilt was curiosity.”
Tom stared back in the direction of the bar as if his mother, even now, were curiously watching.
“Mr. Pitt walked in. I saw him in the crowd but couldn’t place him right away. He didn’t have his wig and I had never seen him bald. He’d ridden nonstop from Grayport, changing horses on the way, and he was so exhausted that his eyes looked punched. ‘Orange,’ he said, and raised the gun. My father turned his chest directly into the shot. I thought my ears had burst. I’d never heard a pistol fired indoors. My father fell back, like the sound had knocked him over, with a pained look of outrage twisting up his face. I don’t recall seeing any blood. Only smoke.”
Molly squeezed her trigger finger inward with her thumb. Her knuckle cracked. The smell of burnt sulfur stung her nose.
“A group of men tackled Mr. Pitt,” Tom said. “Someone dragged me out—I don’t remember who—and I couldn’t see my mother. When I didn’t hear her crying, I thought my father might be all right. The place was in an uproar, my ears were numb, and I kept expecting my mother to call for me or Win, tell us not to worry. It was only when they got me outside I heard her screaming.”
Tom’s voice sounded peaceful, almost casual to Molly, as if the story wasn’t his but something he’d been told. Seventeen years had passed since it happened—seventeen years of living with the shot. He hadn’t moved beyond it, Molly thought. He’d grown around it, like the flesh around the sharpshooter’s bullet in his shoulder.
“Mr. Pitt was tried and hanged,” Tom said. “My mother stayed home—she wouldn’t get out of bed—but me and Win sneaked out. I sat in the crook of a tree, a long way off from the crowd, and started crying when I saw him. They had him on a horse with the rope around a branch, and someone smacked the horse to make it bolt. At first I thought the smack was his neck getting cracked. It made me stop crying but the plainness of it scared me, how he dangled from the rope and twitched until he died. Then I noticed James Pitt standing with his mother. He was ten like me and looking at his father. I watched him so long, he finally stared back. He’d been crying, too, but then he wasn’t anymore. We’ve been looking at each other that way ever since.”
Tom scraped his chair a leg’s length back and sized Molly up, as if her body, not her face, would show the depth of her reaction. Silence was her answer, and a heartsore chill, for both ten-year-old Tom and ten-year-old Pitt, as well as for the losses in her own private memories.
“Our family ran the tavern after that,” Tom said. “We hired hands to do the work we couldn’t fully manage, but me and Win grew up fast and my mother was determined. She was never very strong but she was tough, and even the locals who had sided with the Pitts didn’t hold the outcome against her. When the war broke out, my brother went to sea and I joined the army. We wanted to see the world. My mother encouraged it. But when she died here alone, I blamed myself for leaving.”
“I left my father,” Molly said, as if a tourniquet had slipped and opened up the flow. “I thought he might have died the day I ran away.”
Tom sat straight and gripped her with his eyes. His stare was so direct, Molly’s face began to ache. She concentrated desperately to steady her expression.
“Did he?” Tom asked.
“No. He’s still alive.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Imagine Lem,” Molly said, “with influence and wealth.”
“That’s hard to do.”
“Then think of a nobleman who cracks a child’s tooth.” She thought of hugging him the day he said goodbye and left for Floria, of reaching for his saber when he dragged her on the floor. Love made her miss him, love and all its afterbirth. “I left to see the world and start new. Same as you.”
“I didn’t find what I expected,” Tom said.
“Neither did I.”
The tourniquet inside her reasserted force, causing her to hunch and put a hand upon her breastbone. Tom was too depleted to pursue it any further. He regarded her with something more than bottled curiosity—compassion, or a sense that she resembled General Bell?
“What happened to Pitt and his mother?” Molly asked.
“Back to Grayport first,” Tom said. “His mother eventually moved south to live with family. She died two years ago. When Pitt came of age, he tried to buy the tavern from my mother. She was kind to him. She pitied him but wouldn’t agree to sell. He stayed here in Root, bought a house, and went to war. He was sheriff after that, proud of having clout. But he wants this place. He’s never let it go. He says he has the money. Says he has a right.”
“Was your father right to keep it?”
“No,” Tom said. “He broke his word and all of us suffered. I hated him for that. But as far as I’m concerned, James Pitt lost his rights when his father shot mine.”
Molly couldn’t decide where the truer claim lay. Had she any better right to claim the tavern as her own? She stood and hugged Tom. He didn’t hug back. Then she knelt and laid her head very softly in his lap, as she used to do with Frances when her governess was sewing, and she looked out sideways, admiring the Orange and imagining, believing, she were really safe at home.