and returned to Scabbard Island. Sheriff Pitt volunteered to accompany the prisoners; the pox-dreading constable was happy to allow it.
“Pitt knows about your brother,” Tom said to Molly, “but we haven’t told anybody else what we know.”
“Strictly secret,” Pitt said. “What the deuce happened?”
Molly told about the note, her flight from Root, and Shepherd’s Inn; how her brother had killed Lem to compromise Tom; how he had forced her onto the ship; and how she had managed to escape. It chimed with what they knew and already suspected, but she stunned them by revealing that her brother led the Maimers.
“This Grigory up the hall,” Pitt said. “He’s a Maimer?”
Molly nodded. Pitt responded with a dark-lit grin: to have caught one alive was more than he had hoped.
“He’s all yours,” Tom said. “Get your name in the Grayport Gazette.”
“And Nicholas?” Molly asked.
Tom’s heat had left her body and the cold felt deathly, worse than dampness and depletion, worse than ordinary fear. The warm cooperation that had unified the men was suddenly replaced by an unforeseen chill.
Pitt massaged his hands and said to Tom, “You didn’t tell me he was heading up the Maimers.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s a new cast of light. I might consider our agreement null and void, to catch the leader. Might be worth it if you let me take him in.”
Tom inhaled so fully that he seemed about to levitate. He turned away from Molly, failing to conceal his unexplained euphoria, and searched Pitt’s face as if he couldn’t quite believe the overture his lifelong enemy had made. Molly stood alone and didn’t understand. She was picturing her brother’s neck snapping at the gallows.
“Nothing’s changed,” Tom said. “It’s still for Molly to decide.”
Pitt addressed her softly with a hand upon her shoulder, reminding her how thoroughly he fathomed what was coming. “He’s your brother. It’s a damned hard thing either way.”
“Don’t arrest him,” Molly said, unsure if that was even what the two of them were offering. “Tom and I will go.”
Tom suppressed whatever emotion he had felt and squeezed her hand, joining them together for the task that lay ahead. Molly turned to Pitt and kissed him on the cheek, much to his uncomfortable delight, Tom’s pique, and her own bright sense of putting things right.
* * *
Nicholas slept in his spartan room over the Grayport office and woke before light the next morning, initially convinced, owing to exhaustion and the nighttime cold, that he was still in the winter cabin, that Molly had tried to shoot him the previous day, and that he had lost her in the onrushing waters of the creek.
The present returned in a flash. She was alive. He had found her. He had sent her back to Bruntland.
Yet the gnawing, tightening grief did not relax but rather sharpened as he thought of her at sea, suffering and hating him. A burden to be borne, he thought. Another chronic illness. What could he have done, aside from sending her away? Nevertheless he clamped his mouth and wept against his pillow—half a minute, maybe less, of pressurized rue. It was all that he allowed himself, all that he could hazard if he meant to carry on. He rose from bed and dressed in the dark, ignoring his cough, his chill, his hunger and fatigue, and straightened his clothes by feel, resigned to solving the myriad complications of the day with the same force of will he might have used to ice a fever.
He felt a premonition: something wrong about the morning. The mind, he knew, was capable of clandestine perceptions—of learning in the night, of discovering clues and patterns under the noise of conscious thought. Revelations bubbled up, masquerading as emotions, like the subtle voice of God or nature’s finer instincts.
He left the room in dread and lingered in the staircase leading to the parlor, fearing an informant would be waiting outside to bring him news of trouble.
If only Molly could see beyond the things he had taken. He had given her more, much more than she had earned, and although he couldn’t expect to win her gratitude or love, he prayed that she would keep her word of secrecy with Frances. Dear Frances, now the only soul alive left to love him. He admitted it was foolish, or at any rate a weakness, to let himself dwell on such a sentimental hope. Frances knew what he had told her—complicated lies—and she believed him to be upright, delicate, and pure. Had he ever been an