The plan proceeded as agreed, dissatisfying all. John Summer traveled by riverboat to Kinship, there to uproot himself again and extend whatever prospects remained to distant Burn, a glorified hamlet—nearly at the border of New Rouge—that was surrounded by a palisade to fend off wolves. It was to be Molly and John’s frigid, permanent home in a matter of months, and in the interim Nicholas took her out of Grayport to a cabin in the north to await John’s summons.
The isolated dwelling, rented from one of Nicholas’s contacts in the city, was situated in the wilderness east of Kinship, accessible only by a pitiful road and, for the last ten miles, a fur trappers’ path through the untamed forest. It stood in a leaf-strewn clearing near a gorge with a creek. Thirty feet long and fifteen wide, the log cabin was a single story with a peaked roof, a door and window at the front, a stone chimney, and a crude puncheon floor. The room around the hearth comprised most of the interior. A loft along the back held Nicholas’s bedding, and a dividing wall afforded Molly her own chilly space with a proper bed and—though the room’s doorway had no door—a modicum of privacy. Still it seemed severe, even punitively spartan.
“Could we not have simply hidden in a well-furnished house?” Molly asked.
“We have everything we need,” Nicholas replied.
This was not strictly true. Her brother had hired a man named Edgar to carry their meager belongings and deliver supplies throughout the season. He had a grizzly black beard and the power of a bear but was short and compact: a miniature giant. Molly had failed to engage him in conversation on their way to the cabin, and he had left without a word as soon as he was able, under orders to return in two weeks’ time.
After the early days of tidying and nesting, Molly had little to do but read in front of the hearth and watch her brother studying and writing at a table.
“Practice patience,” Nicholas said, teaching by example as he answered her complaints. He dipped his quill and started a letter by the sunlit window. “Recall our conversation from this morning,” he continued.
Heaven help me, Molly thought. Was it only just this morning?
“‘Occupy my mind, and the hours take wing,’” she said, quoting his advice with overearnest pomp. She flapped her arms gracefully and walked around the cabin, gliding to his side before returning to her rocking chair, her twice-read books, her unchanged view of her unchanging brother with the leaves falling softly and eternally beyond him. Her mockery and flapping hadn’t ruffled him at all.
At least her baby grew active as her womb began to swell, hiccupping and somersaulting, wonderfully alive. She noted every kick and dreamed of little heels. She made a long list of names she encountered in her books, hummed lullabies at night, and often read aloud.
She made her brother move his table to the middle of the room so she could sit beside the window, admiring the view. The weather was peculiar, captivating her and Nicholas alike with pale green sunsets, snow that seemed to pause and reascend before it settled, and temperature swings the likes of which she’d never known in Grayport or Umber. Nicholas said the continent was rife with strange phenomena, especially in the mountains and the Antler River Valley—a region even lifelong Florians considered mysterious—but no belly rolls or otherworldly storms could distract her from the fact that John had left her waiting.
Edgar came and went every two weeks. He delivered fresh supplies and kept Nicholas in contact with Grayport and Kinship, trudging through the snow once winter had arrived and speaking only to her brother in a baritone muffled by his beard. If she talked to him directly, he would pause and turn away.
“Have you told him to ignore me?” Molly asked when he was gone.
“He is terrified of women,” Nicholas said. “There was a marriage, I am told, involving Edgar and a harridan—”
“I don’t trust him. Are you certain he is checking every avenue of mail?”
“Edgar is reliable. Remember it is winter and the way to Burn is treacherous. It’s likely John has written and the letter is delayed.”
She sensed her brother had more to say—disparaging remarks on John’s fidelity and character—but was keeping himself quiet so as not to start a row.
Wind whistled through the walls, challenging the fire. Both liveliness and deathliness inhabited the sound. She could linger indoors but the day called her out. She could venture outside but the cold would drive her in again. She sat in her chair and said, “I want to go to Kinship.”
Nicholas dipped his quill and started writing at his table.
“What harm could it do?” she asked.
“We are supposed to be tending your bedridden sister. You can’t be seen carrying an unwanted baby.”
Even the baby seemed nettled by his words, kicking twice.
“Furthermore,” he said, “snow has blocked the way.”
“Edgar makes the trip.”
“Edgar is not with child.”
“Uh!” Molly said. “And I defended you when John thought little of your nerve.”
He put down the quill and set aside the letter. She couldn’t read the words but saw that he had quit mid-page, having made some mistake, and she was satisfied, at least, to have gotten some reaction. She read to quiet her thoughts but couldn’t concentrate and laid the open book upon her stomach. Her rocking chair’s creak went from grating, to hypnotic, to a rhythmic and incessant combination of the two. She felt the woods around the cabin, leagues of pine and lonesome white, and the creek still surging underneath the ice. Just today she had visited the nearby gorge, where the cold, hidden water made her think of Mr. Fen, his body long since devoured by the fishes and the crabs.
John Summer seemed as distant as a man beneath the sea, her love for him a thing turned watery and vague. What if his memory of her had similarly faded? But she didn’t let him go; he was often in her thoughts, and she believed—as she believed in magic weather—he would summon her.
Molly felt a chill, turned to Nicholas again, and asked him to add a log to the fire. He stared at her and finally seemed to view her as a sister, not a person asking questions, not a burden at his side. He studied her belly with equal care and looked toward the hearth. The wood rack was empty near the feebly burning fire.
Nicholas retrieved a blanket from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. He walked outside without a coat, passed the window like a shadow in the wince-white snow, and returned with an armload of wood from the sheltered supply beside the cabin. The cold had shocked his lungs, and although he had remained healthy thus far, he trembled when he added a log and coughed with terrible force. He poured a cup of water from the kettle at the hearth, added a spoonful of tea, and placed it in her hands. It was merryweather tea, which she used to drink with John. The growing fire blew a shimmer of July across her cheek.
Nicholas stood above her with his back toward the window; the glare seemed to make him translucent at the edges. He knelt and put his palms very softly on her stomach. At moments like these, their life together bloomed and she remembered what a loss she would face when he was gone.
“I have sent Edgar north,” he said, “to speak with John directly.”
Molly’s heart bumped up like a movement of the baby. “You have? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought it wrong to raise your hopes. You must be calm,” he said. “Let me do the worrying for now.”
She rocked and sipped her tea until the warmth reached her toes. The fire rose and Nicholas returned to writing letters. Molly watched the snow glitter gently past the window, regretting how distrustful she had been of Edgar and imagining his long, cruel journey in the cold. Then a draft from a chink curled around her ankles and she wondered why her brother hadn’t wanted to raise her hopes.
* * *
In the final month of her pregnancy, when Molly’s impatience, even unspoken, emanated such a constant vibration that Nicholas too seemed constantly distracted, Edgar returned after an absence of many weeks. He had fought through the snow with a monstrous horse and sledge, and he had only just dismounted and reached the cabin door—beard frozen stiff, cheeks flaky raw—when Molly rushed toward him and said, “Did you speak to John Summer?”
Nicholas blocked her way and raised a hand: Give him room.
Molly acquiesced with blustery reluctance, pacing the floor beside the doorway as Edgar, in his time, dropped a sack beside the table and returned outside to finish emptying the sledge. After the bread, meat, cheese, sugar, wine, vegetables, clothes, lamp oil, books, medicine, and sundry supplies were inside, he opened his coat and produced a sheaf of papers wrapped in oilcloth, spread it on the table, and handed Molly a wax-sealed letter addressed to her.
She snapped it from his hand and kissed his shaggy jowl. He tasted like a dog, like a dear beloved cur, and shrank away as if she might have venom on her lips.
“You saw him?” Molly said. “You spoke to him yourself?”
Edgar grunted in the negative.
“Then how did you get the letter?”
“’Twas delivered to a public house in Kinship,” he said.
“Did you not go to Burn?”
He bit his gloves off and clawed the frozen mucus off his beard, and then he sniffed and cleared his throat and looked to Nicholas, ignoring her.
“Read it,” Nicholas told her. “You have answers in your hand.”
She did so at once, shivering from excitement and the repeatedly opened door, while Nicholas paid Edgar for his work, handed him a packet full of letters and instructions, and sent him off without a drink or even a minute by the fire. Molly was too distracted to regard Edgar leaving, and the horse and sledge were already disappearing into the woods before she thought to call him back. She was speechless and immobile.
“What news?” Nicholas asked.
The frigid winter air had met the swelter of the fire and her body felt both, as if afflicted by a fever. She might have fainted if the baby hadn’t woken up inside her. The letter sagged open in her outstretched hand. She could barely hold it up. It might’ve weighed a hundred pounds.
Nicholas took the sheet and read it by the hearth. His shadow, long and warped, moved gently on the wall. She had memorized the letter as fast as she read it, hearing John’s voice, and smelling his skin, and recognizing quirks in the style of his script: the undulating M’s and overgrown I’s.
Dear Molly,
Forgive me. I write this heavy-hearted on the eve of my departure overseas, embracing opportunities that failed, despite my efforts, to materialize in Burn. I cannot remain destitute in Floria or gamble my advancement on the risk—and we would risk it all our lives—of someone recognizing you as Mrs. Smith from Grayport. I commend you to your brother’s care and vow to send, when fortune allows, what money I can spare to you and your baby.
I console myself believing that we never truly loved. A summer’s dream, lost in fall. We were not meant to be.
Sincerely,
John
She felt him moving off as if his hand had left her breast. Again the baby moved and John was with her, in her body. Was he right? Had she fooled herself in loving and believing? She had loved him as he’d been and yet the letter proved him other: not the kind John Summer, not her own John Summer, but the real John Summer, who had panicked and betrayed her. She was pregnant from a figment—from a commonplace lie.
“I’ll ruin him,” Nicholas said, crumpling up the page.
He tossed it into the fire. Molly wanted to retrieve it—even now it seemed precious, like the petal of a dream—but her weight wouldn’t let her and she settled in her chair. She watched the paper flare and curl. It feathered into ash. She wished she could have read it one last time and seen the angles of the words, the evidence of ink. There was something of the sender’s own body in a letter. She had learned it when their father used to write them from the war, when the letters seemed a physical extension of his presence. Something in the memory would not leave her mind.
“Can he think we care a jot for his advancement?” Nicholas said.
He looked at her, apparently amazed at John’s gall, but whatever he discovered in her face dulled his edges, and he came to her and held her, pulling her cheek against his shoulder, knowing not to speak or offer consolation. Molly stared across the room until a film blurred her eyes. She hugged her brother from the chair but he didn’t feel solid. He was no more present in the room than John’s words, as if by burning them he’d burned her last connections to the world.
She didn’t speak the rest of the day. Nicholas kept the silence. He organized their newly arrived supplies and studied his own many letters. Molly neither read nor ate but sat in her chair, and looked out the window, and daydreamed and napped until dozing and waking scarcely seemed distinguishable. Snow fell, evening fell. Sun lit the woods in oranges and purples till the drifts turned gray, then pearly from the moon.
“We must agree on what to do,” Nicholas said across the room.
Molly’s skin felt glued to her unchanged clothes. “He’s gone,” she said, her voice like a disembodied whisper.
“The babe is half Aquarian, of caramel complexion. We cannot claim the child as our own,” Nicholas said.
Molly stood. She locked her knees but her feet were numb and prickly. It seemed that all her blood had settled in her legs and now her heart, like a bilge pump, was struggling to move it. “We’ll say that we adopted it.”
“You wish to raise a child in a false marriage?”
“I wouldn’t live at all in a false marriage!” Molly stomped across the room, grown heavy in her pregnancy and cradling her womb as she approached him in his chair. “You said it wouldn’t last and we would move when we were ready. Surely we have means to live somewhere else. We’ll try another city, another country—”
“Molly.”
“We’ll be brother and sister with a baby we adopted. Nobody will question us. Nobody will find us.”
“No,” he said firmly, standing up to meet her. “It is abominable the way John Summer has abandoned you, but I will not bear the burden, much as I adore you, and compromise our lives for the sake of an unnecessary weakness.”
She cried to see him harden so but didn’t wipe her eyes. “You call my baby an unnecessary weakness?”
“Is there any vulnerability greater than a child? A living, growing secret, one that might be turned against us. We would struggle for control and ultimately lose, just as I lost you when you and John set against me.”
Dense snow creaked the roof, bearing down above them, and another gusty snowfall blacked out the moon. There would be no getting out for at least another week—maybe longer, given the drifts and Molly’s low, heavy carriage. Simply standing hurt her back. Self-support made her wobble.
“I’ll go alone,” she said.
“A new mother with a bastard at your breast. How would you live? You could not hold employment with your days so encumbered. Even if you could, would you call yourself free? Would it not be far worse than what we had in Grayport, a life you couldn’t tolerate—a life you called a prison? We are young and have the whole map of years spread before us. We are all we have left and no one else will help us. Remember when I gave you this,” he said, raising a pinky to his chipped front tooth. “Father tried dividing us. So did John Summer. The baby is a wedge driving us apart. But together,” Nicholas said, “we’re the strongest people in the world.”
He held her hands and finished with a sentimental sigh but the words felt old, like the fragment of tooth in her locket—something from the past that didn’t link them anymore.
“But we haven’t been together,” Molly said, dead cold. “You’ve told me what to do and held me at a distance, ignoring all my questions and denying me a voice. Were you really so astonished when I finally defied you?”
“Precisely,” Nicholas said. “Our disunity has hurt us. Now I wish to start again, repairing what is broken.”
Molly shook her head.
He pleaded with his eyes. “We’ll find the child a home. A loving family.”
“No.”
“We must.”
“We won’t be parted,” Molly said, pulling away to hold her womb and showing him the meaning of the newborn we.
* * *
Their relations in the final weeks were taciturn and hostile, an intolerable situation in the snowbound cabin. She knew her labor was approaching—the baby had dropped extraordinarily low—and had asked her brother more than once to fetch a doctor. The way to Kinship had started to clear in a rush of warmer air, which had melted much of the snow and turned the nearby creek into a torrent, and although the muddy forest would be perilous for Molly, Nicholas could surely brave the trail to summon help.
He refused with little explanation, maybe fearing she would flee to save her baby once he left, or maybe intending—more cruelly than she had ever thought possible—to use her desperation as a final form of leverage.
“You would endanger me and the baby?”
“I wouldn’t risk your safety on the trail,” Nicholas said, “or leave you here alone in such a delicate condition. If the route becomes reliable, we may attempt to travel.”
“And if not?” Molly asked.
“I prepared for all contingencies.”
“How?”
“I read a book,” he said.
We should have kept a horse, she thought, or left the cabin sooner. Where was Edgar with his sledge? Why had Nicholas insisted on a place so remote? Was he really so prepared, and was she willing to believe it? I will help if you surrender, his demeanor seemed to say, and then I will think of a solution. Otherwise, we stay. But Molly would sooner give birth alone than sacrifice her baby, so they waited, far from aid, each hoping that the other would eventually relent.
Her nights felt surrounded by a wide, cold void. She would wake from fitful sleep, convinced the baby had died, and lie in mounting panic till the child moved within her. Nature seemed a threat: the downpouring rain, branches cracking in the wind. The creek filled the gorge; Nicholas checked it hourly to monitor the swell, fearing it would inundate the clearing and the cabin.
Molly was unprepared for labor but refused to ask questions, hoping to appear less helpless than she was. The act had killed her mother with an outpour of blood. She knew that many infants died—she herself, Frances had told her, had almost been strangled by the cord—and even if the two of them survived, what then?
The following week, her water broke. At first she thought it was urine. She was about to change her clothing in the cabin’s private room when a powerful contraction made her brace against the wall. A cramp seized her back. She stooped but didn’t sit. It was morning, but her bedroom didn’t have a window and she turned toward the doorway, looking for the light.
“Nicholas,” she said.
He walked to her at once, spotless in a boiled white shirt and black breeches, looking doctorly and sharp, prepared to see it through. When the contraction passed, he laid out her sleeping gown and left her in the room, allowing her to change before returning with a candle and a clasped leather bag.
“That hurt,” Molly said. “Does it get much worse?”
“Yes. Don’t be scared.”
He opened the bag and arranged forceps, medical shears, and several unfamiliar instruments on a small table at the foot of the bed.
“Did you really read a book?”
“Twice,” Nicholas said.
“Nnn,” she said, moaning from a second, worse contraction. She lay across the bed, head dangling off the side, while the muscles in her back and lower belly twisted fiercely.
“Another so soon?” he asked. “Impetuous as ever.”
The ceiling blurred and bowed until the tightening relaxed. Nicholas had a mortar and a pair of tiny bottles. He measured seven drops of blue and five of crimson into a glass of boiling water, set the violet mixture to the side, and pulverized a shriveled gray leaf with a pestle. To this he added a pinch of white powder from an envelope, stirred it into the water, and strained the finished liquid into a cup.
“What is it?” Molly asked, slowly sitting up.
“For the pain,” Nicholas said and placed it in her hands.
The smell alone was soothing, like the first air of spring. It wasn’t the first concoction he had given her over the years and yet she hesitated, looking at his face—the fine black whiskers on his jaw, his blank expression—so intensely that he seemed both familiar and unknown. Steam wet her chin. Rain beat the roof.
“It stormed when I was born,” she said.
“I won’t let you die.”
“How can you be so comforting and frightening together?”
“Love,” Nicholas said.
She trusted him and drank. He took the cup when she was finished, held her hand, and smiled sadly. Molly listened to the rain until the sound of it engulfed her.
* * *
What did she remember of the delirium that followed? Nicholas’s potion didn’t quell the pain. It divided her in halves, one feeling, one observing, neither part entirely in tune with what was happening. She spoke to him and cried but she didn’t hear the sound. At other times her voice seemed to echo in the cabin and she wondered who had spoken, wondered who had screamed. Her contractions deepened and quickened, the ebb and flow rising to a long, full tide, as constant as a weight bearing down upon her. Then the weight swelled out instead of pressing in.
The room fell dark. She saw a lantern overhead, or maybe she was sideways and looking at a table. Nicholas was near; Nicholas was gone. For a while she herself disappeared, mind and body, and she only felt the baby growing larger on the bed. It seemed as if her navel had been tugged through her back and she was inside out with the child all around her. Then a vision of her knees, raised and parted far below, and Nicholas’s face in the gap between her thighs. She had the horrible impression she was giving birth to him until her eyes dropped back and rolled around the dark.
She slept when it was over, paralyzed and cold. Under the rumble in her heart was the rumble of the creek. She was certain that the cabin had been taken by the flood. Molly felt the bed sway quietly beneath her and her body felt buoyant, hollow as a bubble. Deeper than the water and her thoughts, there was loss. It made her want to sink and let it swallow her forever.
* * *
Molly woke in bed. The night was soft and windless. Her sleeping gown and blanket smelled fresh—newly aired—and an inkling of moonlight clarified her door. All that made sound was the creek beyond the clearing, brooding and continuous and felt as much as heard. Warmer air beyond the room brought a fragrance of renewal: vegetation, healthy mud. She was sore through her bones but her body felt smooth.
She couldn’t tell how many days and nights had passed, how many memories were genuine or totally imagined. When she moved her hands instinctively to feel her round belly, it was as flat as if her whole lower half had been removed.
Worse. She was empty. She was boundlessly alone. She jolted up with sickening ease and pulled her gown above her hips, examining her waist, where the skin felt loose and her navel had retreated. Her breasts remained swollen and were leaking through her gown. Her baby wasn’t there, in the room or in the cabin. She could feel the loss as surely as she felt it in her body.
Molly slid her feet off the corner of the bed. The floor was colder than the air, still chilled by the winter-long shade beneath the boards. She took her time getting up and gathering her balance. It was odd to see the room from an ordinary height. She had lost so much weight, such a terrible amount, she moved as if afloat into the cabin’s central room.
A fire burned low, mostly embers left aflutter. Their belongings were arranged in crates and bags along the wall. Nicholas’s table had been moved beside the window. On its surface lay a quill, sheets of paper, and a gun.
It was the pistol she and Nicholas had brought when they escaped. No ammunition bag or powder, only the ramrod beside it. The moon drew a thin, glinting line along the barrel.
When she went to the table and looked out the window, Nicholas was standing at the edge of the clearing. He was fifty yards away with his back toward the cabin, gazing at the gorge where the creek was so high that it surrounded him with puffs of illuminated mist.
Maybe the gun was empty. Molly picked it up. She fit the ramrod inside, just as Nicholas had taught her, and determined that the gun was loaded with a ball. She twisted in and listened for the faint grind of powder, put the ramrod down, and took the pistol outside.
Nicholas wore a white silk shirt and black waistcoat. He didn’t move as Molly approached, though he must have heard the suction of her steps in the mud. Gray-green pines ringed the borders of the clearing with the cabin far behind her and the torrent dead ahead. Grass had yet to grow but there was sodden, bubbling moss. The night felt luxuriously warm through her gown, at least until the creek mist wafted up around her. It had wet her brother’s hair and now it wet her face. She stopped and stood behind him, terribly awake.
“You had a daughter,” Nicholas said.
He turned and looked calmly at the muzzle of the gun. His skin was pearly in the moonlight. It lent his face the beauty of a nocturnal flower, one designed for poisoning whatever it could lure.
“My baby—”
“You were hemorrhaging,” he said. “You don’t remember.”
Molly gripped the gun to fight the tremor in her hand.
“I kept you both alive,” he said. “You held her and you nursed her.”
“No.”
“You called her Cora.”
She had considered the name for weeks but Nicholas hadn’t known. It must be true, Molly thought—he must have heard her speak it—but she had no memory of looking at her daughter. Was it possible she’d held her and entirely forgotten?
“Where—”
“I did my utmost.” He pivoted his heel and scrutinized her face. “A doctor would have been as powerless to help.”
Molly kept her distance, stepping sideways as Nicholas moved around her in a circle, and reversed their two positions till the creek was at her back. She raised the gun deliberately and aimed through her tears.
“Nature may be swayed or briefly hindered,” Nicholas said. “In the end it has its way, resolute as God.”
“Where is she?”
“Molly.”
“What did you do?”
Nicholas moved toward her. She retreated with surprise in the cool slick mud until her feet reached the limit of the ground beside the gorge. Vapor swirled around her from the water just below.
“Where’s my daughter?”
Nicholas answered but she couldn’t hear the word.
“Where’s my baby?” Molly yelled.
“Gone,” he said again.
The roar filled her ears, the spray obscured the cabin, and the trees on either side made the clearing like a chasm. She was plunging in the dark. Dark plunged within her. Nicholas continued moving closer to the gun.
“You planned it,” Molly said. “You forged the letter and you trapped me here. What did you do to John?”
“Molly, stop.”
“You killed my baby.”
“Don’t move,” Nicholas said.
He slowly reached toward her and she fully cocked the gun. For a moment, Molly wondered if her thoughts were mere delirium, if everything he’d told her of his efforts, and her bleeding, and the baby at her breast was the truth and not a lie. But the pistol and the bullet couldn’t be denied.
“Was this for me?” she asked. “You’d take me back to Grayport or shoot me?”
“Molly, please. Don’t—”
She fired.
Through the billow, as the kickback knocked her off the edge, she saw the bullet make a ripple in his shirt, near his heart. He was dead before his face ever registered the shot.
Molly fell and hit the water. Night exploded in the splash. She swatted at the surface but the creek rolled her under and the noise, the sound of everything alive, disappeared. Cold crushed her, and her skin shrank tight around her bones.
She didn’t know if she was sinking. She was moving. She was gone. She didn’t try to breathe but let the agony embrace her. Dizzy and alone, she waited for the end.
Cora, Molly thought, seeing colors in the dark.
The colors terrified her, causing her to kick and try to swim. The water dipped and corkscrewed, twisting up her gown. She did her best to right herself and fought the urge to gasp until at last she cleared the surface, coughing but alive. The air sent vivifying tingles through her veins, but she was tired and the cold drained the spirit from her arms. The current was increasing as it barreled down a slope. She caught a branch half-mired in the mud along the shore, but her weight tugged it free. She held it for support.
The creek opened wide and seemed to spill across a plain. The current pulled her sideways. The branch kept her up. She briefly felt the ground, firm enough to stand upon, but suddenly the water churned downward like a mudslide and Molly and the branch flowed toward a river. It was calmer in appearance, oddly white beneath the moon, massive and engorged and strewn with tiny flowers.
Molly held tight. The river took control. She imagined it would take her to the sea unopposed, and parts of her desired that, and others stayed afloat.