“Your brother taught you to shoot,” he said. “You have my leave to do so.”
And then without so much as glimpsing his eyes a final time, she watched him leave the house, off to meet his troops. Molly waited to hear the sound of his horse, and once the hoofbeats had faded up the street, the quiet of the home and of the predawn city had an ominous weight, a rumble of things to come that seemed to vibrate the floor. She ran up the hall to her brother’s locked door.
“Nicholas!” she said, rattling the knob and pressing her ear against the oak. He neither opened the door nor spoke, and she was stabbed with the possibility that Nicholas had died, his condition having worsened unexpectedly during the night.
“Oh, Nicholas, please!” she cried. “Speak to me, at least!”
But after many such attempts there was nothing else to do, so she convinced herself that Nicholas was merely fast asleep, having languished for days in injury and hunger.
She returned to her room and lit a candle. The air was damp and windless, and although her second-floor window opened above the street, she could see very little of the city through the gloom. The pistol lay beside her, fully loaded, on a table. She touched the handle now and then, hoping its presence alone would ward off danger, just as dressing for the rain seemed to guarantee sun.
She continued hearing voices, ever closer to the house. When day began to break, the voices overlapped. The mob was massing in the east and marching up the streets. Clanks and bangs echoed in the unprotected square, and the sun burned the mist into thinner sheets and tendrils. She discerned the men and women coming nearer with their weapons. Passing glimpses—a cluster here, a party there—made the crowd seem infinitely large, moving like a mudslide darkening the ground.
She half-cocked the gun and held it under the sill. The front of the mob appeared in a line, filling up the street between a pair of stately houses. Smocks and gowns, leather and wool; faces hard as bone. Hundreds more surged in behind them from the cross streets. A window broke. The voices coalesced, rising in a chant—“Old prices! Old prices!”—as the mob moved forward into the empty, elegant green.
They halted at the garden in the middle of the square—men and women, young and old, carrying sticks and signs and hayforks and tools of their professions. There was a blacksmith with hammer and tongs, a butcher with his knives, a woman with a torch, a beggar with a rock. Children stood among them, laughing out and shouting, glad as if the riot were a holiday fair.
They parted up the center to allow a small procession: four somber men wearing charcoal coats, following a tall, thin matron in a shawl. She had a bundle wrapped in funeral crepe nestled to her chest. At the sight of her, the mob fell quiet with its chant.
An unseen fiddle played “My Darlin’ Dead an’ Gone.”
Molly leaned out and strained her eyes in dread. The church bell tolled. The matron bowed her head. The mourners stood aside like parentheses around her, and she stood for half a minute till the bell died away. A pale wreath of fog drifted through the green.
The matron raised the bundle: it was a small loaf of bread.
Molly’s deep relief was jolted by the roar. Every implement and picket sign waved in fury as the mob rallied up around the woman with the loaf.
They stormed beneath the window in a sea of fists and boards. Dirty, angry faces spotted her at the window and Molly leapt away. She banged her head against a bedpost, moaned, and dropped the gun. Windows shattered downstairs. They were beating on the house and hollering for Bell, and as she fell to her knees and fumbled for the gun, footsteps pounded upstairs and reached the hall.
She aimed the pistol at her door and half-squeezed the trigger, and she almost didn’t notice when the knob began to turn. The door opened smoothly on its oiled brass hinges.
Molly fired.
She saw her brother for an instant in the smoke.
“Nicholas!” she cried.
He fell against the doorframe and looked at her, amazed.
She ran to him and crouched, patting him down and searching for the blood upon his clothes. He smiled archly with his broken tooth and plum-colored bruises. Molly propped him up but he was stable on his feet.