Tom and Pitt amazed William Shepherd and his guests with news of the Maimers’ demise, but when they asked to see the survivor of the day’s first attack, they were told the man was dead.
“I expected him to live,” William Shepherd said. “The shot went through, clean as you could ask, and he was comfortable enough. Left him sleeping ’round one and he was dead at one thirty. Must’ve bled worse than any of us realized.”
The victim hadn’t spoken since arriving at the inn, and so their last remaining hope was to send his body back to Grayport, where someone might identify him and have some answers. Tom and Pitt doubted it. The trail had gone cold, and if any Maimers remained, losing four of their number would likely scare them off until the spring. Shortly after dawn, Tom and Pitt rode back with the horses and collected the frozen bodies from the road; they made it home just as Root was fully abuzz with news of Davey Mun and Benjamin’s severed hand.
Tom dismounted Bones and walked toward the Orange, where he was almost knocked down by Molly’s running hug. A group of townspeople watched but he held her back tight, absorbing her warmth and smell and feeling he could cry if he were not so hardened and benumbed from the cold. Bess stood close and looked relieved to see him home again. Ichabod waved from just inside the door, opening his mouth and drawing in a breath as if to summon up his long-lost voice and say hello.
“Your hair!” Molly said, fingering the place where his ponytail had burned.
Tom sensed the nearest man considering a joke—Never knew your hair was fine enough to steal—but felt it dissipate quickly when the Maimers’ bodies were laid on the ground. They had stiffened into arcs, having spent the cold night propped against trees. Now the corpses sat together near the tavern’s outer wall in a grim, frozen row for everyone to see.
Tom had seen them plenty and looked instead at Molly, feeling that he knew her, inside and out, as well as he knew the tavern’s secret nooks and scars. She studied the corpses with a deep-cut crease between her eyes, then with softness at their faces—at their dead, common faces.
Some of the crowd began to speak.
“Hope they suffered.”
“Fucking vermin.”
“May the devil have his way and cut ’em into bits.”
But a hush came upon them when Davey Mun’s body was carried into the tavern, the nature of his wound impossible to hide with so much blood frozen into his breeches.
Many more people were converging on the tavern, bundled up tight but seeming not to recognize the cold in their excitement. A farmer noticed Abigail Knox and said her name. Tom and Molly turned to look. Sheriff Pitt did, too. She walked up the road and underneath the sycamore, icicle straight and spectral from the sunlight glaring off the Antler. She was gravely underslept and raccooned around the eyes, but her stride showed the balanced self-possession of a pastor.
She had come to see the bodies. She had called for the Maimers’ deaths, and she was not afraid to witness what her vengefulness had wrought. People stood aside so she could walk directly up, and she examined the row of corpses, pausing over each. Tom and Pitt approached her.
“This is all of them?” she asked.
“We think so,” Tom said. “How’s Benjamin?”
“Feverish and weak. Did you recover his hand?”
The men exchanged a sidelong glance above her head. Pitt faltered. Tom replied, “We haven’t checked their bags.”
“He wants it if you find it,” Abigail said.
She held Tom for support and he escorted her inside, where he entrusted her to Bess as townspeople flooded through the taproom door. Tom and Pitt were soon surrounded and besieged with endless questions. Why had they ridden out alone? How had each Maimer died? What would happen to the bodies and the dead men’s belongings?
Abigail was equally beset but she appeared, for once in her life, appreciative of so much unsolicited attention. Bess had led her to a chair and brought her a glass of sherry, and she accepted many hesitant but heartfelt assurances. Benjamin would live, she repeated several times, bolstered by the fortified wine. She had left him in the care of her neighbor, Mrs. Kale, and in spite of her insistence that she must hurry back, she drank another sherry in her seat beside the fire.
Tom could not escape the crowd, which thickened every minute—was it possible that all of Root had crammed inside the tavern? There were others here, too—men from Shepherd’s Inn, late-season travelers, everyone united by the fall of common foes. Tom told versions of the story to the crowd, each iteration shorter than the last, until he ultimately snapped at a well-meaning farmer:
“They’re ruddy fucking dead. Go outside and have a look.”
All he wanted was to get away and sit alone with Molly, preferably upstairs with a fire and a drink, but when he looked around the room, she was nowhere in sight. Bess had vanished, too, leaving Ichabod alone to work behind the bar. Tom lingered for a minute, avoiding additional questions by feigning interest in Pitt, who had warmed himself up with free drinks and started telling his own versions of events—each one longer than the last—to a captivated group so tightly massed together that Pitt was standing on a chair in order to be seen.
Tom squeezed away and made it to the kitchen. Nabby faced him from the hearth with a wrought-iron flesh fork and approached him so directly, he expected her to hug him.
“The storeroom hams are out of reach behind crates,” she said, as if he had merely just returned from a stroll around town. “Ichabod has tried a quarter hour to retrieve them.”
“Any trouble while I was gone?”
“Someone hexed my right hand—I haven’t determined who—and I could not make a fist until I finally guessed the healing word and scrawled it down with ash. Otherwise, no. It’s good you lived,” Nabby said, returning to the fire. “As for those out front, their belongings must be burned. All they carried has a blood curse, especially the coins.”
“I’m glad I was missed,” Tom said, nonetheless soothed by his cook’s familiarity. “Where are Molly and Bess?”
“I haven’t seen Molly. She’s as hard to pin as Scratch. Bess is in the parlor, speaking to her father.”
Tom slouched against the wall, too raw and worn out for yet another fight. He didn’t resist the vision of his uncle as a corpse, rigid as the bodies of the Maimers outside, nor the wish—the near prayer—that Lem would drink himself to death. Before he had a chance to cross the kitchen into the parlor, his uncle started shouting from the tavern’s front door. Molly and Bess were there, too, and all the crowd turned to listen. Tom’s powder burns stung as if his body were aflame again. He shoved into the taproom and forced his way to Lem.
“And what of the hams?” Nabby said.
He was mad enough to kill.
* * *
Molly had been standing in the front of the taproom, listening as Tom and Pitt talked about the Maimers, when she spotted Bess and her father. Lem had arrived through the kitchen, and would surely have been jabbed by Nabby’s iron fork if Bess hadn’t immediately dragged him into the parlor, a rarely used room on the opposite side of the tavern. It was smaller than the taproom, long but very narrow, with sharp gray light coming from the windows. Molly moved fast, entering through the front just as Lem and Bess entered from the back.
Lem was oddly dapper in a waistcoat and unstained sleeves. He’d combed his greasy hair, or slapped it down flat, and he had bathed and trimmed his beard and didn’t look drunk. In spite of his enormousness, he shrank in front of Bess, although he hardened some and frowned when Molly stood beside her.
“Are you going to be nice?” Molly asked.
“If I’m given leave to talk,” he said, speaking with a voice more righteous than abusive.
“Talk,” Bess said. “I have things to say, too.”
“I come to say the tannery’s been doing good without you. I hired the Button boys for extra help. We have skins in all the pits and enough hides to keep busy through the winter. And I ain’t had more than two drinks a meal for half a fortnight.”
Bess took a breath and shook her hair behind her, looking spirited and young and vigorously flushed. Molly fought a nervous and irrational urge to laugh.
“I ain’t been myself since the pox took your mother,” Lem said. “She had a softness and a easiness, a look full of comfort. We was sick and she was dying but she quieted the fear. I haven’t felt that since, ’cept with you. You’re all I got.”
He was teary, Molly thought, or else perspiring into his eyes. Was it love that made him cry, or something else that made him sweat so profusely in the cold? Molly looked at Bess and sensed beneath her confidence a pint-sized girl who wished she had a parent. She remembered how it felt to embrace her own father and to feel, through his bones, how he faltered underneath.
“I regret the way I left,” Bess told Lem. “You should have known about it first. I wanted to hurt you and I shouldn’t have, however much you earned it. You’re my father and I don’t want us fighting anymore.”
Lem smiled with relief and raised his arms to hug her.
“I’m staying at the Orange,” Bess said. Lem dropped his arms. “I won’t change my mind, not if you drag me off, or beg and plead, or storm around the tavern breaking fiddles with your head.”
Lem’s smile grew deformed, tangling in his beard. “We can make it like it was, clean the vats come spring—”
“But you won’t!” Bess yelled with a sudden step forward. “You’ll drink and blame luck and freeze to death by Lumen Night. I want you to fix the house and work for more than a month. I saved my earnings all summer—you could have it, every pound, if you showed real effort and convinced me I was wrong.”
Lem scrunched his face and seemed to honestly consider it, the way a man of doubt might regard a glimpse of God. “And then you’d come home?”
Bess shut her eyes. “I want to choose my own way. I want you to respect that.”
“And where is your respect for your own bloody father? Coming home cold to nobody and nothing, not a friend or kind relation caring I’m alone. I’ll be buried in a hide pit, moldering in shit, without a soul upon the earth noticing I’m gone. Poor and pocked, cruelly widowed—so I drink, aye, and rant, and curse what I’ve become. But here I am, in spite of hardship, with rights to what is mine.”
“Doesn’t Tom have a right to live without your foolery?”
“Tom,” Lem said, hunching at the name. “He disrespects his own blood. People listen and believe him. I only ever asked for respect.”
“You haven’t earned it!”
“Neither’s he,” Lem said, turning now to Molly as a stand-in for Tom. “He ain’t above rolling in the dirt, now, is he?”
Molly answered in a single, unhesitating outburst and felt a rush of clarity and dizziness together. “Say whatever you like. Tell the whole town. Nobody will listen to a tar-hearted brute who doesn’t fix his house, or comb his raggedy beard, and acts a menace in the tavern and a scoundrel in his home until his daughter offers money just to let her be.”
Bess gawked, either startled or confused by Molly’s vehemence.
Lem quivered like a beast newly branded, at the instant when the sizzle hasn’t yet burned. He swung his forearm and shoved Molly hard against the wall, and then he left the front of the parlor and continued to the taproom. Molly and Bess pursued him, squeezing around his bulk and blocking his way in front of the crowd, just as Lem began to shout at everybody present.
“My nephew’s done it again!” he said. “Made himself a hero! Now he’s back, safe and cozy in his ready-made home, with a pair of young women cleaning up his messes. I’ll tell you why I don’t want my daughter in his house.” He looked at Abigail and pointed, causing her to redden. “You were right,” he said. “Abigail was right with her suspicions!”
Tom entered from the kitchen and began shoving through. Molly stopped him in the middle of the room as people watched. Her lungs were in her gullet. Tom was solid as a bomb.
“I seen ’em!” Lem said. “Tom and Molly like bog toads flopping on the ground, right out back where anyone could watch. So I did. I stood and watched while she rode him in a sweat.”
Bess’s mortified tears were scalding and aggressive. “Get out!” she said and pushed him, hard enough to stagger Lem halfway out the room. His bloodpox scars turned scarlet on his brow.
“There’s your hero,” Lem said. “Left his mother on her own—left her here to die. Then he came back home and took what wasn’t his and now he’s master of the house! Captain of the troops! I wish the cannon would have done more than broke his fucking wall. I wish I made it blow the whole tavern into bits.”
Lem stomped out and slammed the door behind him, letting in a momentary gust of frigid air. Bess watched him go and then refused to turn around, but everybody else looked at Tom and Molly. No one spoke, no one sniffed. Hardly anybody shuffled.
Tom approached Pitt, leaving Molly on her own, and said, “I didn’t instigate that. I didn’t fight or drag him out. Forget you and me and think about Bess. He isn’t going to stop. You have to understand that.”
Pitt took it in, aware of being watched. His head looked as solidly preserved as Nabby’s hams.
“Please,” Tom said. “I’m coming to you for help.”
Respect was not the angle Pitt had seen coming and it dumbed him for a second. He sighed and pinched his eyes. “I haven’t slept in two days. I’ll talk to Lem tomorrow.”
“Talk,” Tom said.
“Family squabbles aren’t a matter for the law,” Pitt said. “I’d think a man like you, with all your storied history, would rather keep the public and the private cut clean.”
“He sabotaged the cannon.”
“Said he wished he had. It’s not the same thing.”
Molly’s concentrated vision gave Tom a rippling aura. She couldn’t see his face and wanted to approach him but she didn’t dare move, not with everybody watching—not when any quick touch might trigger an explosion.
“Lock him up or quell him or I will make it private.”
“Take it easy,” Pitt replied.
“I mean it,” Tom said. “I won’t be held accountable if things go bad.”
He walked toward the stairs and people cleared a lane. Bess let him pass and Molly watched him go, and then he climbed until the shadows swallowed up his head and said, “I’m going up to sleep,” to no one in particular. “Anybody knocks, I’m shooting at the door.”
* * *
Tom remained upstairs and no one approached his room, not when a scuffle broke out in the afternoon, nor when the bodies were moved to the yard behind the tavern, nor when Ichabod discovered Benjamin’s hand in one of the saddlebags and ran the frozen prize directly to the Knoxes.
Molly spent the day in a small, stifling bubble. She didn’t know what Pitt had learned from Mr. Bole or how he meant to use it. Now Tom had gone to bed without a word of reassurance, and she hated him for doing so and leaving her alone. Still she craved him in his injury and surliness and sleep. It was almost worth the risk of opening his door. She had earned it. Had she earned it? He had promised he was hers.
Bess focused on her work, preoccupied and shamed by her father’s behavior. Nabby grumbled in the kitchen and was better off avoided, especially after Scratch mauled the ham she’d cooked for dinner. Ichabod confined himself to swift, efficient signs, as if his gestures were reminding him of Benjamin’s severed hand.
Once the taproom cleared and night shrank the tavern, the day’s heavy pall wrapped itself around them. No one spoke. They tidied up and swept the floor, and Tom did not appear. Davey Mun’s body had been carried to the barn—tomorrow they would send him home to Liberty, to family—but the Maimers sat exposed against the tavern’s back wall. The town had not decided whether to bury them or burn them; if winterbears or wolves dragged them off, all the better.
Molly passed them when she walked outside to gather wood. She felt the need to touch one—the youngest—on the face. Her fingertips were moist and fastened to his cheek. It was cold, fully cold, and death was everywhere around her in the dark black river and the glitter-white grass. She tried imagining quicksummer, the transitory season that was said to follow deadfall and offer some reprieve before the full brunt of winter, but the freeze seemed far too permanent to thaw.
Molly pulled her finger off the Maimer’s white cheek. Suddenly a strong, warm fragrance pulsed around her, like the sweetness of a nosegay blooming in the sun. The child ghost was with her. Molly breathed her in. She remembered being pregnant in the summertime in Grayport, the fullness and contentedness of carrying her baby. Then without knowing how, she perceived the ghost’s name and wished that she could hug the little girl and give her comfort.
Molly went inside and rubbed the shivers from her arms.
“Her name is Gwendolyn,” she said.
“She trusts you,” Nabby said. “You must have told a special bit of truth when she was listening.”
The fire seemed dangerously hot inside the hearth and yet approachable and smooth: the special glow of smoakwood. She took a warm stuffed apple from a platter on the table and the sugary meringue put the fear of night behind her. Bess entered from the front with a tray full of cups. Her honey-brown hair was lovely in the light. She hadn’t said a word about her father’s revelation, seeming to expect that Molly would confide in her and obviously peeved that it had taken all day.
“You have a letter out front,” she said, putting down the tray. “The postman hasn’t been. Someone else must’ve left it.”
“A letter?” Molly asked, starting into the taproom.
“It wasn’t there this morning when I cleaned,” Bess said.
They went together to the broad maple table near the bar where the uncollected mail and newspapers gathered. Lying on top was a tri-folded letter. It was on cream-colored paper with a green wax seal and a single word—“Molly”—in a clear, familiar hand.
She crushed the apple she was holding, squishing custard through her fingers. “It’s from Abigail,” she said. “I recognize the M.”
“Why would Abigail write—”
“To stay at Benjamin’s side.”
“But why would she write to you?”
Molly snatched the letter up and stuffed it into her pocket.
“Aren’t you going to read it?”
“Later,” Molly said. “I’m going upstairs.”
“It hurts me that you still won’t trust me,” Bess said, blocking Molly’s way and noticing the apple squashed in her fist.
“Your father knows plenty. Go and ask him. Or are you hoping my embarrassment will cover up your own?”
Had she mashed the ruined apple into the depth of Bess’s ear, she would not have left her friend any more astonished. Molly shook her hand, splattering the cream, and stomped upstairs before Bess recovered her voice.
On the lightless second floor, with the stairway behind her and the hallway ahead, Molly stopped at Tom’s room and listened through the door. There was no trace of movement, no snore or subtle breathing.
She was crying in the dark and couldn’t see the blur, but felt the tears warm her cheeks and quickly dribble cold. She raised her hand to knock, but no—she had to wait. She tiptoed away and lit a candle in her room, and then she settled on the bed and took the letter from her pocket, fearing what was in it, dreading it was true.
* * *
Abigail dimmed the lantern to its lowest possible flame, a small gold feather glowing on the wick. Benjamin had stirred; all afternoon he’d mumbled in delirium. His scientific mind had fallen to incoherent rambling and his talk of moons and stars, of meteors and tides had sounded mystical to Abigail: words of revelation. He had sipped a little broth but taken nothing else. His injury had bled again, more than she expected when she swapped the old bandage, but the stump looked clean. She prayed it wouldn’t fester, forcing her to tie him down and amputate the arm. Abigail had often seen it done and heard the screams but she had never held the knife, never sawed bone. She would do it if she had to. No one else would help. He was hers, she meant to keep him, and she wouldn’t succumb to fear.
She flipped the cloth upon his forehead, troubled by its heat. It was a beneficial fever that would burn away the bad—unless it ran too red and started burning out the good.
When he had first staggered home he’d been cold beyond belief, bloody and depleted and collapsing at the door. Frostbitten ears, crystallized coat—stiff as winter wood when she dragged him into the parlor. She had stripped off his clothes and salved his frozen skin, rubbing beesmyrrh and spirits onto his chest until he colored. She had not seen him naked in a good many seasons and he’d looked like a child, like an underfed boy. Delicate and trembling. Wholly in her care.
She’d found the strength to haul him up the stairs, where she dressed him in a nightshift and bundled him in blankets. While she worked, he revived enough to tell her what had happened. It distracted him from suffering and let her take control. She found his spare tenaculum, drew the arteries out to tie, trimmed the ragged flesh, and sewed up the flaps. Following his superstitious faith in extra cleanliness, she bandaged him with purified lint and boiled linen. He approved of all she did and seemed relieved when she was done.
She ran to the Kales, and young Esther sprinted to the Orange. Tom and Pitt arrived later and she sent them into the woods; then she sat beside Benjamin and prayed for his survival. Then this morning Mrs. Kale had arrived shortly after dawn, bringing news that Tom and Pitt had killed the Maimers and returned.
Abigail had hurried off to see if it was true. The bodies had neither gladdened her nor weighed upon her conscience. Possibly fatigue had stifled her reaction. But the townspeople’s sympathy had buoyed her profoundly. How the wine had eased her shoulders, how unguardedly she’d spoken! Oh the shame of it, the taverness of spilling out her thoughts. She had gossiped with an unfamiliar man—a common traveler—who had asked about the Maimers, Tom and Pitt, Bess and Molly.
“That one,” she had said. “Tom pulled her from the river. Lies and trouble ever since.”
Now she couldn’t put Lem’s revelation from her mind—not what he had said, but that he’d said it to her. “Abigail was right with her suspicions,” he had yelled, as if the two of them were equals in the dirty work of rumor. It was rumor that had sent Pitt riding off to Liberty, suspicion that had angered Tom and kept him at the tavern. Otherwise they might have gone with Benjamin and Davey, four instead of two riding out against the Maimers.
She clasped her husband’s living hand and wished he weren’t sleeping. His face seemed lacking in the absence of his glasses and his larynx looked swollen in his beanpole neck. She had never known the house to feel so still, and she knelt down close and hummed beside his ear. It was a melody she’d learned from his irritating habit, one she couldn’t name but recalled note for note. She hummed instead of praying, wishing that her own frigid hands could draw his fever down, and fell asleep crying in the low-lit room.
She woke before dawn, when the sun was still a blush. Leafwings sang. A smell of smoke was in the air. It might have been the hearth except the odor was impure, as when a thing you shouldn’t burn is thrown upon a fire. She had nuzzled up to Benjamin during the night, and now she felt his forehead. His fever had decreased. He was sweaty, he was cool, and when she relit the room and changed the dressing on his stump, she found the wound had oozed but still looked clean. She felt refreshed, having slept, and Benjamin was better—only what about the morning felt so wrong?
There were voices outside, people in the street. When she listened more intently, she perceived the sounds of hoofbeats and shouts too distant for the words to come clear. She stood before the window and pressed against the glass. Neighbors walked briskly to the river or the tavern. Men leaned forward in their strides, full of purpose, with their hats tipped low to counteract the cold. Women hurried past, some with open cloaks, as if they’d barely thought to bundle when they walked outdoors.
She saw the blacksmith’s wife, her friend Mrs. Bolt. She had her skirts in her fists and hiked above her ankles, trying not to stumble in the icy, rutted road. Abigail ran downstairs and out the door, where the wind blew sharp against her neck and through her clothes. Here the smoke was more intense: something sizable had burned.
“What’s happened?” she called to Mrs. Bolt.
“Abigail Knox! Have you slept through it all?”
Mrs. Bolt came toward her, kept moving, didn’t slow. “Lemuel is dead. His house is all afire!”
Abigail crossed herself, buckling in the cold.
“And that is not the half,” Mrs. Bolt continued. “He was dragged from the flames but the fire didn’t kill him. He was bludgeoned on the head—his skull was driven in. Now the sheriff has arrested Tom Orange in the tavern. He was found this morning drunk and there was evidence upon him.”
Abigail staggered, almost tripping on her heels. She wheeled her arms and caught herself, seeing for a moment, as her head tipped back, a haze of dirty smoke in a nauseating smear.
Mrs. Bolt hurried on, craning backward as she said, “And the young woman Molly up and disappeared. The sheriff wants to find her. Give my best to Benjamin, I’ll call upon you later!”
“No, I don’t believe it,” Abigail said.
But she was talking to herself. She was frozen to the heart.