Bell Weather Read online

  Frances was thirty years old but dressed, and spoke, and acted much older—more like her father’s musty great-aunts—yet oftentimes, especially when Molly drew her on, Frances ran and even laughed like the youngest of the household maids. She was pretty when her hair fell loose, and she had wonderful breasts for a woman so angular and thin. Molly noticed how they bobbed when Frances hopped away; she loved to nap upon her governess’s bosom in the sun. As an infant, she had breast-fed emphatically—several wet nurses had been urgently retained—and how she loved to suck, even now, on everything from berries to the cream inside a pastry.

  Having nothing else at hand, Molly settled for her pinky.

  “Such a habit for a girl of nearly seven,” Frances said. “You will never be a lady, sucking your finger and swallowing spiders.”

  “I’ll sail to Floria and do whatever I like,” Molly said.

  “The savages will skin you.”

  “I’m not afraid of savages.”

  “The winterbears will eat you.”

  “I can outrun bears!”

  Molly kicked her shoes away and darted off barefoot, running through the sumptuous abundance of the garden with the soft fronds palming at her skin, the mossy stones, and all the warm, wet ferns—oh!—moistening her ankles. What a joy it was to run. What a bother wearing clothes! Frances chased her, getting close, but Molly darted through a very tight gap between bushes, and she quickly left her governess behind and hurried on.

  She ran toward the entrance at the kitchen, through the door and over the cold stone floor, through the pantry and the gilt room with all its sullen portraits—noblemen and ladies who had never sucked a pinky—which she hurried past, blowing raspberries, till she crossed the central hall and reached the library door.

  She tugged it wide and panted at her brother, who was seated at a table in the middle of the room, moon-white and watching her, expressionless and calm. Molly’s heartbeat punched. Lord Bell was there, too—it should have been a tutor, Father never taught on Wednesdays!—and the moment he turned to see her at the door, Nicholas smiled. Molly smiled back and flushed to her earlobes.

  Lord Bell didn’t chastise—household rules went without saying—but he stared to see if Molly would depart without reminder. Frances hurried up behind her, huffing from the chase. Molly looked at Nicholas—he seemed so lonely and dispirited without her, stuck inside with Father on a fine bright day—and she decided that her only means of staying was to climb. She scaled the nearest bookcase and hoped to reach the top. It was easy as a ladder, multicolored as a tree.

  “Ignore her,” said her father, turning back to Nicholas and forcing him to focus his attention on his studies.

  Frances stood below and tried to whisper Molly down. The quiet of the room, the manners and composure tickled Molly to a laugh that made her brother chew his lip. She watched him as she climbed, hoping to impress him, and she didn’t see the ceiling till she bumped it with her head. The knock surprised her and she reached up, rubbing where it hurt, and then her foot slipped free and she was dangling one-handed, fifteen feet above the hardwood floor.

  Frances yelped. Lord Bell jerked around and banged his fist upon the table. One of the table leaves jumped and hit Nicholas’s jaw, and Molly weakened at the sound, losing her purchase on the shelves. Nicholas stood and clasped his mouth, bloody at the chin, and Molly fell from the bookcase, her petticoats and hair fluffing up around her.

  Lord Bell tried to catch her but she crashed through his arms and hit the floor hard, knocking out her wind and battering her hip. Frances, in her fright, had fallen backward in the doorway, ghastly white with vivid red hives around her neck. Molly scrambled to her side. Frances held her close until she finally got her breath, and she was just about to cry when she remembered Nicholas and pushed away, running across the room to see his wounded mouth.

  Lord Bell caught her elbow.

  “I’m sorry, m’lord,” Frances said, wobbling to her feet. “It was all my fault. We were running in the garden.”

  “You were not to go running in the garden,” Bell said. “You were to keep her calmly occupied while Nicholas was studying.”

  “Yes, m’lord, I’m sorry, sir. As I said, it wasn’t her. I allowed it and I chased her. She was frightened of the chase. She didn’t mean to climb—”

  “I did!” Molly shouted. “Let me go!”

  “Return to the garden,” Bell said to Frances. “I will summon you when Nicholas’s lessons are complete.”

  “M’lord—”

  “Now,” he said, squeezing Molly tight enough to bruise. “Close the door behind you.”

  Frances nodded with a curtsy that was virtually a swoon. Tears clung like little bubbles to the governess’s eyes, and then she left and shut the door with the gentlest of clicks.

  “Nicholas is bleeding!” Molly said.

  Her father cocked an eyebrow and looked toward her brother. He was startled by the sight, glancing back and forth as if the siblings were deceiving him, but Nicholas’s mouth was genuinely bloody.

  “How—”

  “It was you!” Molly said. “You struck the table and it jumped!”

  Nicholas confirmed it with a quick, sharp nod.

  “I would not have struck the table if you hadn’t climbed the shelves,” Bell said.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him!” Molly yelled and tried to free herself.

  Bell gripped harder. “Show me your mouth,” he said to her brother.

  Nicholas approached him.

  “Take away your hand—a split lip, nothing more. Let me see your teeth. Ah,” Bell said.

  Molly wilted at the sight. Her brother had lost a fragment of his upper left incisor. Molly pinched herself as fiercely as she could and started crying.

  Bell turned to her and said, “See what your unruliness has wrought.”

  “Nicholas, I’m sorry!”

  “No,” Bell said, looking at her brother, who for one bright second had regarded her with sympathy. “She mustn’t be forgiven. She has injured you and injury requires proper justice. Think upon your lessons. Lex talionis. You have seen it in the Book of Light, as well as in the histories of clans and ancient kings. Even our own common law demands equality of recompense for certain types of crime.”

  Molly sobbed and shook her head, knees buckling underneath her.

  Nicholas faced their father with a grave, princely dignity. “A thief would lose his hand.”

  “Yes,” Bell said.

  “A man who killed his neighbor’s ox would have to pay an ox.”

  “He would.”

  “And if a rider dropped his reins, distracted by a bellman, and trampled a child in the street,” Nicholas said, “should the bellman himself be trampled, or the bellman’s own child?”

  Bell hesitated briefly with a flicker of his eyes. “One should never drop the reins. The rider is to blame.”

  “Then you should lose a tooth,” Nicholas told his father. “It was you who lost control in a moment of distraction.”

  Bell straightened up and answered with a grin: half a dozen of his pale beige teeth, neatly ordered. “I have told you more than once you have a future at the bar.” He offered Nicholas a handkerchief, immaculately white and monogrammed B. “Still, she must be punished,” he continued, looking down at her. “Tell me, Molly: did Frances start the chase or was it you?”

  “It was me.”

  “Then Frances lied.”

  “No.”

  “She either chased you or she lied. Which is it now? The truth.”

  “That isn’t fair!” Molly said, twisting free with her heart beating quicker than a bird’s.

  “Very well,” Bell said. “I will hold you and Frances equally responsible. Unless you choose to bear the total punishment yourself.”

  Molly nodded in defiance.

  “Twice the count or twice the force?”

  “Twice the force,” Molly said, bravely as she could.

  “Nicholas, your shoe.”
r />   Her brother paused just long enough to register objection, but then he raised a leg without unbalancing his stance and popped the left shoe off his heel. It was stiff, silver buckled, with a black leather heel. Lord Bell lifted Molly by the armpits—he held her so infrequently, it came as a surprise how powerful he was—and took her to a chair, where he sat and bent her over, belly down, upon his thigh. She focused on the highly polished floor and held her breath, unable to see her brother with her hair fallen wild in her eyes.

  Her father raised her skirts, exposing her to view, and said, “You are no stranger to discipline, Nicholas. You have learned to bear the blows. It is time you learn to deal them. Twenty for her and twenty for Frances. Land them flush and keep them firm, straight across the buttocks.”

  No! Molly thought. Oh, he wouldn’t ever hurt me!

  Her horror was assuaged when Nicholas refused.

  “You must,” Bell said, “or I will give her eighty.”

  Make it eighty or a thousand, only never one from Nicholas! Molly shut her eyes, dizzy from the blood swirling through her head. The first smack upon her bottom blew the air from her lungs.

  “Very good,” her father said.

  Another smack, even cleaner, made her squirm and kick her feet.

  “Hold her legs if she obstructs you.”

  Molly dropped her legs. She wouldn’t cry or make a sound. She’d imagine it was Father, and she wouldn’t raise her heels and force her brother to restrain her. The next several blows struck tears from her eyes. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. The sting had risen to a fire. Another and another, steady as a drum, until the pauses seemed to hurt as badly as the whacks. The twentieth was red, the thirtieth was white, and then the colors bled together and she shut her eyes and wept. She drooled upon the floor, contorting her expression till her face ached, too. When it finished, she was stupefied.

  Abruptly she was upright and facing them again, her bottom so inflamed it seemed impossible it wasn’t still exposed and being beaten. Nicholas stared at her with no apparent sign of recognition, not a glimmer of apology or violence or pity. His complexion hadn’t warmed. He seemed as delicate as ever, breathing faintly as if he hadn’t raised a finger in exertion.

  “Return to your work,” Bell told him.

  Nicholas obeyed. Even when he sat and it was safe to steal a glance, he neither looked at her nor paused before resuming with his quill.

  Molly’s father led her out and shut the door behind them. They stood in the entrance hall, its skylight shining high above. The fresher air was like another day, a whole different season.

  “You bore it well,” Bell said, bending at the waist to see her up close. His eyes were soft, even timid, and his skin looked weathered in the strong illumination. She focused on the wire-stiff bristles in his nose. “You needn’t ask forgiveness now. If Nicholas wishes, we will fit him with an artificial tooth.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt him,” Molly whimpered.

  “Nor I you,” her father replied. “My duty as a parent calls for discipline at times. Do not think I relish it. But punishment can edify, if only you allow it. Every lash can be a lesson, every weal a tiny scripture.” He touched her on the ear and said, “I know that with maturity and governance—self-governance, Molly, and fewer of these incidents and trials—I will one day count myself proud to be your father.” He kissed her on the head and sent her to her room, watching her ascend all thirty of the stairs.

  As soon as she was free, Molly hid beneath the covers of her bed, lying on her stomach and imagining herself inside a cave made of snow. Every throb reinforced that Nicholas had struck her. Nicholas, her brother and her best and only friend. How he hated her—he must!—for costing him a tooth. How his aim had never faltered, how his strength had never waned! She heard the birds beyond the window and considered leaping out. Would the fall truly kill her? She would have to hit her head. They would grieve her then, and Nicholas would love her once again.

  She stayed within her cave until the door creaked open. It was Nicholas. She knew because he sounded like a ghost.

  “You can give me forty more!” she said, throwing off the sheet and turning round to meet him. The agony redoubled when she sat upon her heels.

  Her brother smiled more than usual, perhaps to show the gap. The blood looked ferocious on his white silk shirt. His hand was in a fist. She noticed right away because his hands were always delicate, with fingers made for instruments, calligraphy, and scalpels.

  “I have something else to give you,” Nicholas said.

  He opened his hand. Molly crawled along the bed until her nose was at his palm. In the center, so it seemed, was a tiny shard of porcelain.

  “Your tooth,” she said.

  “Take it.”

  Molly held it with her fingertips.

  He kissed her on the crown and said, “Keep it to remember it is he who tries to hurt us—as a promise that he won’t have control of us forever.”

  “I thought you hated me!” she said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Nicholas told her. “But he will make me punish you again.”

  “I’ll be good. I’ll behave.”

  He smirked and said, “You won’t.”

  Molly sat back, wincing at the pain.

  He continued with a look much colder than his words: “Never forget how much I love you, even when I hurt you.”

  Molly squeezed the tooth so it bit against her hand.

  “I’ll never hurt you again,” she said.

  “You will.”

  “I won’t!”

  “You’ll have to.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re the strongest people in the world,” Nicholas said, and though his answer seemed ridiculous considering their wounds, she brightened from the inside out and tried to smile.

  “We’re stronger than everyone,” she said.

  “Except each other.”

  “But together—”

  “Together,” he said, imbuing the word with confidence and hope, even while his strength kept burning in her welts.

  Chapter Six

  Molly shut her eyes and sped her horse across the meadow, finally alone and racing from the family’s grand country manor. She rode astride—there was nothing so foolish as a sidesaddle; Lord Bell himself disdained the convention—and felt the power of the beast’s strong charge between her legs. Warm green wind billowed through her hair. The thoroughbred’s musk blended with her sweat and what a glorious stink arose, what a riotous aroma, drenching out the rosewater fragrance of the day. She felt the muscles and the rolling undulations in her body and she might have been a runaway. She might have been a centaur.

  Molly rode as often as she could, regardless of the weather, especially in summer when the family left the city for their sprawling country estate. She had taken her first lessons as a child and now, at the age of fourteen, could jump an energetic horse over any sort of obstacle. Her discipline and daring won approval from her father and he encouraged her to ride, especially today with the general paying a visit.

  Lord Bell had talked of little else throughout the week. General Graves will be arriving, General Graves will be expecting, we must all of us prepare to be our best before the general.

  “Your father’s to be a colonel,” Frances told her several nights ago, when she joined Molly and Nicholas for their customary after-dinner hour.

  “He bought a regimental contract,” Nicholas explained. “Now he’ll buy a regiment and lead it overseas.”

  “To Floria?” Molly asked. “Are we all going with him?”

  “Heavens, no.” Frances laughed. “Unless you wish to fight a war.”

  “Against the Rouge?”

  “And half the naturals,” Nicholas said.

  Dominion over Floria had been contested since the continent’s discovery a hundred years prior. It was a land of fertile mystery, largely unexplored and rife with natural wonders—harbors cloaked in salt; ten-foot snows; native people called the Kraw, who were said to g
row from the earth. It was also a land of riches, bursting with timber and marvelous crops. Some believed a panacea might be growing in the forests. Others believed that Floria, undiscovered during John Lumen’s lifetime, was where the resurrected prophet went upon leaving Bruntland.

  Three Heraldic countries had established permanent footholds. Solido had claimed an island portion in the south, but the Florian mainland had been split between Bruntland and Rouge, whose centuries-old hostility had flared, in recent years, between the countries’ rival colonies in the distant New World. Floria’s native tribes had chosen sides—the Elkinaki with the Bruntish and the Kraw with the Rouge—and now the fates of all involved would ride upon the outcome.

  “Could we lose?” Molly asked.

  “Your mother,” Frances said, “is the only thing your father ever lost in all his life.”

  And so the general had arrived to speak about the war. Nicholas would meet him, as he always met the barons, earls, admirals, and other dignitaries in their father’s constellation of acquaintances, and Molly—who was rather “too excitable” a spirit—was encouraged, quite emphatically, to ride about the grounds. She had gladly chosen a mount, a stallion named Tremendous, and ridden off the instant the general arrived.

  Shadows cooled her face and she finally opened her eyes, slowing to a canter as she turned before the tree line. She had crossed the whole expanse of half a mile fully blind; far across the meadow she could see the distant manor with its barricade of hedges and the sunlight glinting off the glass.

  Molly shook her hair and resettled her feet in the stirrups. Tremendous reared and whinnied. Several hundred birds flocked together overhead and made a cloud, ever shifting, like a picture of her life. She closed her eyes once more and galloped back toward the manor. Soon her father would be leaving. He had gone away before, even gone abroad, but never with an army, never to a war. She and Nicholas and Frances would be masters of the home, both here and in the city, for the next few seasons—maybe for a year. Or so she told herself, believing that the war would lumber on. Was it wicked to imagine her father a captive of the Rouge? Anything could happen in a real live war.