a tiny pair of demons, and he marched toward the door, better than he’d marched all day during muster.
Tom laughed, and yet it pained him like a rupture in his chest. “You’re riding out for this?”
Pitt smiled from the door.
“It’s almost dusk,” Tom said. “The Maimers’ll be out. On second thought, go. Although aside from your coat, I can’t think of anything they’d bother cutting off.”
Pitt ignored the insult but heeded the warning: night fell swiftly in the woods. “I’ll go at dawn,” he said.
“She hasn’t caused trouble all month,” Tom said, stumbling backward with his heels against the barrel of the cannon. “If it’s me you want to hit, aim at me direct.”
“Housing a woman in need is one thing,” Abigail said. “Housing another man’s wife…”
It was quiet outside and turning violet in the twilight, pregnant with the dark and overripe, overdue. Ichabod was still, Bess was scared to say more, and Nabby held the lantern up and kept her own counsel. Tom looked to Benjamin for sensible support. The doctor sighed as when a wound was past the power of his art.
“Tom,” Benjamin said. “It may be time we learned the truth.”
Even you, Tom thought, hardened to the marrow. He’d been fighting against the current since he caught her in the river. “People have a right to earn a fresh start.”
“Look at the ruin at your feet,” Abigail said, surprising Tom briefly with a ring of genuine pity. “She’s a firebrand. You shouldn’t have to bear—”
“Speak another ill word against a person under my roof,” he said, “I’ll pick you up and throw you out the goddamned hole.”
Abigail recoiled, mostly from the blasphemy.
“You go too far,” Benjamin declared. He sounded like a skinny man, delicately boned, whose principles and pride made him physically imposing.
“Get out,” Tom said to Pitt and both of the Knoxes. “Come back tomorrow with your hayforks and torches.”
Rather than wait for them to move, he shoved them all aside—“Easy!” Pitt said—and exited alone. He walked through the taproom, where a few straggling drinkers smartly kept their mouths shut, and stomped upstairs to look for Molly in her room.
He strode down the hall and opened her door without a knock, ready to hammer out the big and little secrets of her heart. Nobody was there. He’d sworn he wouldn’t chase her if she ever ran away again. His cousin’s dried flowers gave the room a blush of summer, sweetening the cannon-fire odor he’d been breathing. Molly’s stockings hung naked on a chair beside the bed. The ghost of her asleep and laughing and undressing made the room so empty, so Molly-less and still, he caught a glimpse of deadfall congealing in the shadows.
He gritted his eyeteeth hard enough to squeak and went to the stairs again, prepared to gallop off and find the man who said he knew her. Something made him stop: a feeling in his skin. He turned toward his own room and opened up the door.
She sat on the edge of his bed. Her hands were in her lap, furrowing her skirt. She looked at him with lowered chin and upturned eyes, and her complexion seemed softer in the dim, private light. He almost rushed her. Was it to haul her up or squeeze her in relief? Just to feel her. How or why, he couldn’t positively say.
He closed them in and said, “You’ll never guess what’s lying on the storeroom floor.”
“I did it,” Molly said.
“My God. A chip of honesty. You care to tell me why?”
“Promise you won’t be angry.”
“I’m a fair ways around that corner already.”
“You were going after Pitt,” Molly said, standing up. He raised a hand to settle her down, as if she’d stood and shown a gun. “I thought you meant to hurt him.”
“You were worrying for Pitt?”
“I was worrying for you, you bully-tempered clod! What if you’d attacked him?”
Tom approached her with a huff, lungs full of steam.
“You shot a cannon to distract me? Did you truly think I’d risk—I ain’t a clod of any fashion. You might have tried dissuading me.”
“I did.” Molly frowned. “You said you’d throw me in the river.”
Tom made fists until the boil in him cooled, and then he sat on the bed and slouched with Molly standing over him. The twilit blue coming from the window showed him half of her: a hip, the subtle veins along her wrist. He focused on her waist, imagining it full. He knew she’d given birth since Benjamin had told him, yet the news