The Orange remained closed. Molly, Tom, and Pitt had returned the previous day to flabbergast Root with the tale of Grigory’s crimes and the final events in Grayport, then retreated to the quiet isolation of their homes, leaving the town to talk and wonder and embroider on its own. The trio had reemerged this morning for Lem’s burial, and afterward Molly walked Bess home to the tavern, guided her into their room, and closed the door behind them. They settled on a bed and Molly held her hand. It was a hand with bitten fingernails, a child’s smooth knuckles, and lifelong calluses below them on the palm.
Bess had heard the story same as everyone in Root. That her father had been murdered seemed to matter less than that he’d died while he and Bess remained bitterly at odds. Lem had gained the pitiable glow of many dead brutes and now his silence, so different from the bluster of his life, allowed the finer whispers of her memory to rise. Molly understood. She felt the same about her brother now that he was gone, and she remembered all the ways he once protected her from harm.
But the time had come for Bess to know the truth in all its ugliness, and Molly told her everything as clearly as she could—her childhood, her father, John Summer, and her baby. Nicholas and the Maimers. Nicholas and Lem. She rushed it out efficiently and tried to get it done before the pressure in her chest prevented her from speaking.
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “It was him. I let him go. I couldn’t see him hanged, oh I’m sorry … Bess, I’m sorry.”
Bess had dug her fingers like talons into the mattress and had listened, rarely blinking, never once interrupting. Her astonishment at learning General Bell was Molly’s father had diminished when she learned that Nicholas had murdered Lem. They were sitting hip to hip and Molly hugged her from the side, if only to hide her own face and keep herself from rambling. Bess’s stomach grumbled softly and she didn’t hug back. The hearth fire hadn’t yet heated up the room and the warmth between their bodies grew thin.
“You’re bleeding,” Bess said.
Molly let go. Her left-arm bandage had begun to seep through. Bess unraveled it and scowled at the irritated skin. She dabbed the blood with a cloth and studied the deepest wounds, each of which Molly could remember having made, as if the memories she’d called upon were labeled on her arm.
Bess applied a tingly mint salve with her fingers, took a fresh strip of linen, and began to wrap the arm again.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Molly said. “Do you hate me?”
“No,” Bess said. “I’m sorry about your baby.”
She proceeded with the second wrap, and Molly let her do it, sensing that her friend’s insistent ministrations were as comforting to Bess as to her own throbbing arms. Sun filled the room and tricked the iciness away. The finished bandage spiraled neatly from her elbow to her wrist, and Bess secured it with a pin and pulled down the sleeve. She looked at Molly up close and kissed her on the lips. It was sisterly and sweet and pleasantly insouciant, raising shivers like the salve she’d applied to Molly’s wounds.
“You’re staying now for good?”
“Yes,” Molly said.
“Do you love him?”
Molly smiled.
“We’ll be family if you marry him.”
But something hadn’t been right about Tom since they returned. It was more than Lem’s burial and worry over Bess, more than the exertion of the last few days. Molly hadn’t found a chance to speak with him alone. She had spent the night with Bess, dreaming of ships and Grigory’s death and little Cora on her own, and she had woken up scared and hadn’t felt at home. Every minute was a footstep leading to the next but she had no clear sense of which direction they would go.
* * *
Tom stood with his back to the window in the Knoxes’ kitchen, taking the twilight draft directly into his spine. Abigail added an extra log to the fire, an uncharacteristic extravagance—she thought of deadfall as God’s good reminder of the grave—but one she willingly bestowed for the comfort of the guests. Benjamin sat at the table, genial and talkative but shiveringly frail. Molly sat beside him like a well-loved niece. Tom admired his friend’s acuity in sensing her discomfort. It would never have crossed Benjamin’s mind that Molly might blame herself for costing him a hand, but once he’d read it in her manner, he behaved with more fragility, allowing her to help him into his chair, cover his shoulders with a blanket, and remain by his side in heartfelt penance.
“It’s time to change your bandage,” Abigail said.
“May I help?” Molly asked, standing up and walking forward.
Abigail paused without at first replying. She went to a cabinet for an earthenware jar and fresh supplies, laid them on the table in front of Benjamin, and summoned Molly over to a basin near the window, where she washed Molly’s hands and scrubbed beneath her fingernails. Molly looked pleased, familiar with Benjamin’s fixity on cleanliness and seeming to believe, through the careful preparation, that Abigail was showing her a great deal of trust.
Benjamin removed his sullied bandage, which Abigail deposited into a boiling pot of water. It was an ugly wound. The flesh had shriveled since the cut and gradually retracted. Now the forearm bones protruded slightly from the muscles and would probably result, once the stump was fully healed, in noticeable bumps instead of the smoother, neater surface of a proper amputation.
Molly stood there, expressionless, long enough for Abigail to question her resolve, but then she sat and got to work as calmly as a surgeon.
Benjamin watched her over his glasses. He smiled reassuringly and said, “First a gentle cleansing. Dab lightly. Do not rub.”
Molly did as she was told and asked him, “Does it hurt?”
“I am reasonably dosed to tolerate the pain. Next the unguent,” Benjamin said, pointing with his chin toward the earthenware jar.
Molly applied the unguent and continued to follow instructions, next by covering the muscles and the bones with lint pledgets, then applying strips of linen that extended up his arm. She secured these with a winding roll and finally with a cap, like a baby’s knit hat, that was placed upon the stump for added warmth and padding.
Abigail nodded as she gathered the supplies.
“Thank you,” Benjamin said.
Molly smiled with relief.
“Can I talk to you alone?” Tom said to Benjamin.
Benjamin stood without assistance, his legs prepared to move before the question had been finished. He had expected this, it seemed, and he and Tom walked together into the hall toward the parlor, leaving Abigail and Molly uncomfortably alone.
“Her resilience continues to amaze me,” Benjamin said to Tom. “Attacked by a winterbear, slashed above the knee, pricked upon the arms several dozen times, nearly drowned, and then imprisoned—to say nothing of the frigid journey and emotional toll—and yet she still appears healthier than half the souls in Root. A quicksummer spirit,” he declared with satisfaction.
He crossed the book-lined parlor and sat in a rocking chair, resting his newly capped stump on a side table covered with sheet music.
“She has a talent for dressing wounds. I must consider an assistant given my impairment. Abby is adroit, as you know, but lacks the temperament of inquiry so vital to the medical pursuits. Do you suppose Molly would consider an education in basic surgery?”
“As long as she doesn’t practice on me,” Tom said.
He saw the jar with Benjamin’s hand displayed upon a shelf, the glass softly tinted by the dusk-light blues. The hand was horribly mundane—whitened by the spirits, perfectly intact, and vertically positioned in the semblance of a wave. The gulf between the jar and Benjamin’s wrist was too unnatural to dwell upon, so Tom focused on his friend’s weatherworn face and on the wisps of gray hair that rose above his ears.
“I should have ridden out with you,” Tom said. “We’d fought the day before and I had worries at the tavern, but it wasn’t an excuse to let you go alone. We all knew the danger and it didn’t stop Davey. It didn’t stop you.” His stomach clenched tight and bent him forward in the chair, and though he didn’t bow his head or kneel upon the floor, the whole of him was prostrate. “Forgive me,” Tom said. “I wish I’d acted different.”
Benjamin took his glasses off and placed them on the table.
“Your first concern was Molly.”
“Aye,” Tom said.
“We were foolish to ride out, only two and unprepared. I blame myself for Davey,” Benjamin said. “I couldn’t save him.”
“If three of us had gone—”
“But who can really say?”
The parlor seemed to shrink and they were close enough to whisper. Shadows in the room solidified and deepened, growing ever more substantial than the objects that cast them.
“My loss is grievous,” Benjamin said. “I forgive you all the same. Decapitation—nothing less—would sever our connection.”
He offered up the stump to shake Tom’s hand.
“Remarkable,” he said, noting his mistake. “Considering its absence dominates my thoughts, withholding it would seem the natural inclination. Yet the opposite is true. I constantly present it. Perhaps it’s similar to the intellect acknowledging some ignorance, displaying curiosity in order to advance itself. We must expose our weaknesses before we overcome them.”
“Might be habit,” Tom said.
He touched the woolen cap, feeling some of the relief of Benjamin’s forgiveness—glad, at least, the friendship had outlived the maiming—but reminded of the trials they had witnessed and endured. What had any of them gained in the balance of surviving? What would he himself present to counteract the loss?
* * *
Molly stood in the barn and smelled the quicksummer breeze. The sweet, capricious weather would last for several weeks and everyone had told her to enjoy it while it lasted. But the dead stayed dead. Plants that had fallen to the frost would not awaken, and the cold still lingered in the barn’s deepest nooks, in the hard-packed ground, and most of all inside her.
Bones ate a pair of bulbous apples from her hand. The crunching sound was pleasant, like a walk in heavy snow, and Molly liked the way his mouth took the fruit, spicing the enclosure with a cidery aroma. She could smell something else beneath the apples and the musk. The tavern ghost was with her.
“Gwendolyn,” she said.
Molly breathed a fragrance she remembered from the cabin: warm spring rain softening the cold. She leaned against Bones, glad of his support, until the memory of Cora seemed less another ache and more a glimmer of the quicksummer night that swirled around her. The ghost stayed beside her like a ripple in the dark, like a child needing comfort.
“Hush,” Molly said. “You can stay with me tonight.”
A gust brought a goose seed floating through the barn. Molly caught it with her fingertips—a black-and-white puff, feathery and light around a small gray seed. Ichabod was working near the barn’s front door and Molly showed him, raised the seed, and let it go upon the wind. They watched it flutter up and join with many others, sailing to the east above the moonlit trees. Molly hugged him very hard—the truest sign she knew—and left him smiling when she crossed the yard and went inside the kitchen.
Nabby rolled dough beside a row of buttered dishes.
“What are you baking?” Molly asked.
“Quicksummer pies. The ember gourds will ripen overnight in this weather.”
“What’s an ember gourd?”
Nabby gave her a hex eye for asking such a question. She often seemed convinced it had to be a joke, all the commonplace things Molly didn’t know. “You’ve seen the vines creeping on the barn’s west wall?”
“Yes,” Molly lied.
“Ember gourds,” she said. “We need to pick the fruits before they redden and combust.”
She sprinkled flour down and rolled another circle from the dough. Nabby must have made a thousand such pies during her life, and yet she didn’t look old tonight; the oversized mobcap crammed onto her head gave a transitory glimpse of Nabby as a girl.
Molly laughed. “I’ll help you pick ember gourds tomorrow.”
“Then the barn will burn to ashes.”
“Give me an hour,” Molly said. “I’ll help you then, I promise.”
She left Nabby muttering at the row of buttered dishes, walked beneath the wishbones and up the front stairs, and hesitated briefly at the door of Tom’s room.
“Come in,” he said before she knocked.
Molly went inside and closed the door behind her. Light pulsed softly from a near-dead fire, and the room smelled cold, as if the sun never touched it. Tom faced her from the middle of his threadbare rug. His hair was newly trimmed—Nabby had neatened up the back, where the flames had burned the locks—but the stubble on his jaw was two days heavy and his face looked haggard, more tired than a full night’s sleep could truly remedy. She hugged him but he didn’t hug back, not in earnest.
Beyond him out the window, goose seeds flurried in the warm dark wind, but he hadn’t raised the sash to let the quicksummer in. Molly let him go and wished she understood him—what was troubling his mind now that everything was safe?
“This used to be my parents’ room,” he said, looking around. “When I was young, six or seven, my mother let me sleep in here whenever I was scared. I used to stare at a knot in the wall. That one over there.” He pointed at the spot. “I pretended it was the world and wished that I could hold it. One morning I took a knife and tried to pry it out. My father caught me gouging at the wall. He whipped my legs for that.”
She looked to where he’d pointed, searching for the knot, but the wall was too dark for any details to show.
He sat on the bed and both of them, the bed and Tom together, sagged from overuse. Scratch, who had been hiding in a shadow near the pillow, leapt at Tom’s leg. Tom seized him by the scruff and tore him off his thigh. He held Scratch at arm’s length, murderously grim while the cat flailed and growled, and he seemed about to throw the creature into the fire when he softened, almost grinned, and placed him on the rug. Molly opened the door. Scratch bolted into the hall. She closed the door behind him and examined Tom’s leg, which was bleeding through his breeches. Tom ignored the scratches but his spirit seemed torn.
“Why did Pitt let you go?” Molly said abruptly.
Tom hesitated, blinking at the words before he said, “He’s a decent sheriff, believe it or not. He didn’t want Nicholas to take you.”
“He could have come for me himself.”
“I said decent, not competent. The man is never subtle. He’d have blundered after Nicholas and got himself shot, or let him get away, or God knows what. I trusted him to try. I didn’t trust him to succeed.”
“But you haven’t told me why—”
“In the spring,” Tom said, “once I’ve made arrangements, I’m selling him the Orange.”
He settled on the bed again. The hearth log crumbled.
“No,” Molly said. “No, you can’t. You didn’t need to!”
“It broke my heart to do it, but I did,” he said. “I needed to.”
He reached to take her hand and pull her down beside him but she walked across the room and stood before the window. The clouds were sailing lower. Wind pushed against the sash. She tried to warm her palms by putting them on the glass.
“I’m sorry,” Molly said, collapsing on the inside, afraid that if she looked at him, she might collapse entirely.
“If anyone’s to blame,” he said, “it’s Nicholas and Pitt.”
“If I hadn’t run away, you wouldn’t have had to choose.”
“My father made a choice to keep the tavern when he shouldn’t have. I always used to wonder if I would have done the same. Now I know,” Tom said. “I’d like to think my mother would agree with the decision.”
“But what will you do?” Molly asked. “Where will you live? What about Bess and Ichabod and Nabby?”
“I haven’t told them yet,” he said. “It was part of the agreement that the three of them could stay, provided they decide to. There’s no forcing Nabby out, even if Pitt wanted her gone. I’d guess that Ichabod’ll stay. Bess might, too. As for me”—he drew a breath, like a long backward sigh—“I plan to build a house and maybe be a smoakcutter. I’d like the outdoor work and there’s a fortune to be made. There’s talk of opening a route past Dunderakwa Falls, shipping logs downriver to the sea at Claw Harbor. In the winter I would stay at home, keep brewing beer. There’ll be ruddy high demand if Pitt brews his own.”
She visualized a house near the smoakwood trees with their cinnamony fragrance, and the heavy black leaves, and the snows so enormous Tom would have to tunnel out or simply hunker down tight in the long winter’s grip.
“What about me?”
“Pitt would keep you on if you decided to stay,” Tom said. “He likes you.”
“I want a home of my own.”
“Alone?”
“No.”
She opened the sash and propped it with a cherrywood stick.
“The seeds are getting in,” he said.
“It’s warmer outside.”
She dropped her cloak onto the floor, along with her gown and apron, and stood in her skirts and stays in front of the inblown air, lowering her head and watching through her lashes as the seeds rushed around her, clinging to her hair. They tickled her nose and smelled like maple-sugared oatmeal. She brushed them off and crossed the room and stood in front of Tom.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m untying my stays.”
“They look tight.”
“They are. We were talking about my prospects.”
She dropped her stays and tugged her shift off her shoulders, pulling it down around her waist so it bunched below her navel.
“There are plenty of hardworking bachelors in Root,” Tom said, avoiding her eyes in favor of the more engaging view. “Men who would be eager for a spirited companion.”
“The main concern,” Molly said—she raised her skirts and straddled his lap—“is how much spirit such a man would willingly endure.”
He held her under the blooming cloud of petticoats and sighed, convincing her at last he would never let her go.
“And what would you do,” Tom asked, “with a good, durable husband?”
“I would trouble him forever.”
“Trouble I can handle.”
Molly hugged him for the heat—the breeze was not entirely warm—and buried him in hair. His stubble scraped her nipple.
“You’re smothering me,” he said, but then he hummed between her breasts and held her even tighter with a hand upon her back. Molly breathed the smoakwood aroma of the fire, which had boldly reignited with the fresh night air.
She held him by the ears. “You’ll have to push me off.”
“I’m stronger than you,” he said, muffled by her bosom.
Seeds whirled around them like feathers from a cannon.
Molly freed his face and whispered in his mouth, “We’re the strongest people in the world,” and then she put him on his back and didn’t feel cold and kissed him in the quicksummer wind, glad of home.