Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney

Author:Dennis Mahoney [Mahoney, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9781627792684
Google: ap3YBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00R13IBRS
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2015-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

That was how she recognized the Maimer in the Orange. He was the locket thief, familiar with his long, crooked nose.

Molly told Tom a version of the story, carefully trimmed but with enough good meat to give it substance—enough, she hoped, to sate his curiosity for now. She told him nothing of their lives back in Umber, nothing about their false identities or masquerade marriage. She called Nicholas her brother and used his real name, and she referred to Kofi Baa as “a trader from Aquaria.” It had been strange to let the story blossom in her mind again, knowing both the seed and the eventual corruption. Her surface had been cool, her insides boiling. There were questions she herself had not yet answered—pieces of her past she couldn’t fit together—and she scarcely knew which part of the truth would compromise her worst.

In essence, Tom learned that the siblings Molly and Nicholas had arrived by ship and struggled in Grayport, had been employed by a benevolent Aquarian, and had apparently fallen foul of a street thief who would, in time, become the Maimer currently imprisoned upstairs.

Tom leaned backward, one hand on his cup, the other on the pipe clamped in his teeth. Smoke obscured his face. The lantern hung behind him; she was lit and he was not. Molly’s mouth had gummed up, and she had already finished her drink. She didn’t remember doing so and tried to take a sip, but all she got was smoak grounds, gritty on her tongue. She craved another cup. How the flavor had relaxed her—it felt as if she’d drunk a little portion of the tavern. Oh, to be a stranger! Just an ordinary woman in the taproom with Tom, sharing smoak and conversation, free from scrutiny and doubt.

She flipped the cup and let the grounds ooze slowly in her hand, and then she moved them with her finger, drawing symbols in her palm. Tom kept smoking. His tobacco glowed and crackled.

Did he believe a word she’d said? Did he expect her to continue? His silence seemed to indicate that she hadn’t confessed enough, and he would sit, and wait for more, until the pipe went cold.

* * *

Tom smoked a while longer, trying to fill in the blanks and sift the truth of Molly’s story. She had answered what he’d asked, telling him how she knew the Maimer, and given him more of her recent past than she had confided to anyone in Root, including Benjamin and Bess. But damned if she had told him anything of worth.

She sat the way a water drop dangles off a spout, perfect and precarious as long as it can hold. He laid the pipe beside his cup and said, “You never learned more about the visit that night?”

“My brother was secretive,” she said. “Even as a child.”

“You’re sure the people he met in the parlor were respectable?”

“No,” Molly said, glimmeringly honest.

“Private business,” he mumbled, low enough that Molly leaned forward into his words. Tom

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