in the old portrait looked demure, with a very faint smile, almost sad in its serenity. Molly, on the other hand, was tousled in and out. She looked forever like a girl who’d been rolling in a bed, or a woman blown to laughter by a great rush of wind.
Her growing breasts were less pronounced because her hips and derrière had filled out, too. Yet they still looked surprising, buoyed by her stays, and felt delightful to her palms when she caressed them in the night. She thought it strange the way her baby fat had subtly returned, how she softened while her brother grew sinewy and sharp. She had her monthly blood now; the first time had alarmed her, but the chambermaid Elise had quickly eased her mind.
It was Elise that Molly had spied on throughout the summer when the maid, grown bold in Mrs. Wickware’s absence, spent most of her nights with a chimney sweep who climbed through her window after dark. They lit a small tin lantern on the table near the bed and Molly watched them from the hall, peering through the keyhole, curious at first when she passed and heard the sounds, then compulsive, having stayed and grown obsessed with what she saw.
The chimney sweep was filthy and could not be called attractive. He was gangly, to begin, with a tall narrow face, and showed a great many ribs through his winter-white skin. Yet his muscles and his tendons were intriguingly distinct, and Molly gasped to see his manhood rising and engorging.
She was shocked to see Elise take the length of it inside her—how delirious she seemed, how at ease with his ferocity! The way his skinny buttocks clenched together when he thrust, how his balls slapped against her like a loose sack of coins. It was altogether vulgar. It was violent and wet. Her body opened and enveloped him, absorbing all his force the way a pillow takes a punch, and what astonished Molly most was how Elise appeared to strengthen, and the chimney sweep to weaken till at last it seemed to kill him. Molly envied her immensely. What a gorgeous ruddy sweatiness and languor in her limbs! How adoringly the chimney sweep embraced her in relief.
“I’m bored,” Molly said.
“You’re free,” Nicholas answered. “You may do whatever you choose.”
He was right, in spite of the fact that he was constantly directing her. He’d taught her what her father hadn’t thought to teach a girl—politics, anatomy, and weaponry included—but as much as she appreciated all that she had learned, she chafed against his tutelage and yearned to get away.
Molly crossed the room and opened a sash. The street was lively far below, sunstruck and colorful with active passersby. There was a lady with a parasol and wide floral skirts. A tinker clinking spoons. A fiddler and a gypsy. Children sprinted by and Molly craned to see them, tipping dangerously forward on the sill.
“I want to go out,” she said. “I haven’t ridden in months, haven’t swum, haven’t—”
“We cannot travel as long as Mrs. Wickware is here,” Nicholas said. “She must be kept—”
“As I am kept, bottled here in Umber.”
“You could walk to view the sea.”
“And look at ships I cannot board.”
“Soon,” Nicholas said. “The world will open its doors and you will choose whichever you please. Come. Reload the gun.”
She twirled and clutched her hair. Another day, another week of stultifying lessons: kidneys, torts, firearms, sonatas and partitas. She walked toward the gun and said, “I want to use a ball.”
“It is needless,” Nicholas said, although the notion seemed to please him.
“Then I won’t practice shooting anymore.”
“You must.”
“Why?”
“Because—”
“I know,” she said, “I know,” having asked the question strictly out of petulance.
The truth was that Mrs. Wickware’s fear of home invasion was not entirely unfounded. There had, of late, been an upsurge of mutinous incidents throughout the city. Thefts, assaults, and murders; violent threats, both idle and enacted; speeches, strikes, and frequent calls to riot and revolt. The hungry lower class, unable to afford the barest of necessities, was demanding fixed prices in the marketplace, menacing vendors, railing against the government, and turning with alarming rapidity to crimes against the wealthy. With the cold season bearing down, there was no telling how severe the situation would become, and Nicholas insisted Molly learn to use a gun.
She thought of the people she had seen below her on the street and tried to imagine shooting someone dead—the tinker, perhaps, or one of the children’s downtrodden parents.