She felt the spill between her legs and touched it with her fingers.
“Don’t be frightened of the blood,” he said. “It’s natural at first.”
“I know. My brother explained…” She heard herself and paused. “I didn’t have a mother or a governess to ask. Nicholas taught me things to warn me and prepare me.”
“And your marriage?”
“It’s a ruse. We’re hiding from our father.”
She listened to his heart, reassuringly alive, and curled against him with the sunlight falling on her knees. The sun was overhead, straight above the roof, and must have been reflecting off something outside. Another window, Molly thought. What if somebody had seen?
John didn’t speak. He expected her to talk. The ivy-patterned walls seemed denser as she stared, and his muscles felt tighter than an octopus knot. She could tell him just enough, embroidering the lie. Instead she told him everything, as true as she remembered, till at last his body softened and he stroked her sweaty hair.
* * *
He escorted her home an hour after dark but stopped to let her walk the last stretch alone. To face Nicholas together would exacerbate the risk. Molly pulled him into a shadow for a kiss before she lost him—his plans could not be changed, he left for Kinship tomorrow—and he promised he would think of some solution and return. Molly wasn’t sure. Having dallied with adultery, or something very like it in the weeks of his suspicions, he’d failed to act and finally let Molly take the lead. Had the reason been restraint, or had the jeopardy dissuaded him? And how did he view her now—as the artificial wife of a cunning young man whose fortunes, like his own, were bound to Kofi Baa? If their lies and misbehavior reached Kofi’s ears … Molly’s heart sank, imagining their patron’s disappointment. All his trust, all their prospects would shrivel in the flame.
“Write,” Molly said.
“I will,” John assured her.
She drew him from the shadows but his face remained opaque. The nearest burning streetlamp was several doors away and even now, after making love twice and studying him for hours, she couldn’t read his body language, couldn’t guess his thoughts.
A final kiss and then he left, preoccupied and grave.
Molly found Nicholas waiting in the glum brown office. He sat behind the desk, trimming quills with a penknife, its silver looking fiery and keen beside a candle. His eyes had the same lively flicker as the blade.
She closed the door and felt exposed, as she had been with John Summer, and discovered the exposure made her liberated, strong. Dressed or undressed, fettered or released, she was whole within herself again, completely Molly Bell.
“You’ll tell me you’re in love and need your freedom,” Nicholas said. “Can you tell what I will answer?”
His expression and his tone were pompously serene. There he sat, so certain he was privy to her secrets, and she hesitated, wondering how informed he truly was. His contacts and clients were dispersed throughout the city. Someone might have seen her, Mrs. Jacob Smith, entering the inn on the arm of John Summer and remaining there, cloistered in his room, until the dark.
“I don’t care what you answer,” Molly said.
“You do.”
Nicholas pressed the penknife’s blade against his lips, the way a man in contemplation might gesture with a finger. Molly held his gaze but swayed in her resolve. She used a table heaped with books as a low defensive wall, needing something more physical than insolence between them. Molly still viewed him as the brother of her memory, desperate in his privacy and quiet self-reliance. Yet he had aged beyond his years since arriving in the city. He was graying over the ears, hard to rile, hard to gauge, his authority as natural and tailored as a uniform.
“You’re becoming like Father,” Molly said.
His temple vein bulged. He lowered the knife as if his arm hadn’t strength enough to hold it. Then his eyes met the challenge and replied:
I am better.
Molly clutched her hair until it made her think of John, how his hands had combed the strands, catching in the knots.
“I have far too many ties,” he said, “to sever all connections, but in time—another year, perhaps—a simpler situation may be carefully arranged.”
“A year!” Molly said. “I cannot bear another day!”
He paused and said, “I know,” speaking with a mournful twinge that seemed—she may have imagined it—to show a little more than disappointment. Was it fear? “You would risk all we have—”