half his face and leaving the other half eclipsed. “Get your house in order before it becomes a question of considering your license. I’m meeting with the governor next month and it’s my duty to mention any municipal concerns that need addressing.”
“Since when is hiring women a municipal concern?” Tom asked, backing Pitt up toward a shadowy pile of manure.
“I’ll make a list of incidents and nail it to your door,” Pitt said, presumably in jest. “You know I’ll have to speak about the prisoner who escaped.”
There had been three more attacks in the intervening weeks, and comments had been made, rarely to Tom’s face, that his failure to keep the Maimer secure had cost the town a vital advantage. Throughout the exchange, Lem had done his best to keep himself steady, but he suddenly lost his balance and stumbled into Pitt, who managed to prop him up but trampled the manure.
“You’re made for each other,” Tom said without amusement.
Pitt scowled at Lem and said, “Go home and sober up.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll reimburse me for the mess you caused tonight,” Tom said to his uncle.
“Not until you reimburse me for my Bessie,” Lem said.
“I’ll let her know you’re willing to barter. You can leave from out here. I don’t want you tracking filth through the tavern. You, too,” he said to Pitt, who only now looked down and saw what he was standing in.
Pitt nodded at his shoes as if this, exactly this, was what he expected from the Orange, and Tom himself couldn’t help regarding his property as a place where, yes, shit like this and people like his uncle were bound to appear.
Lem clomped away; drunk or not, it was the only way the man ever walked. Pitt wiped his feet in the grass, rather too close to the door, and left Tom alone as rain began to fall, drenching and warm and somehow stagnant in the dark.
Folks, Tom thought, recalling Pitt’s word.
It was Abigail still, slipping thoughts in people’s heads. She had publicly supported Bess’s moving in, but for Tom to harbor Molly was something else entirely, despite the fact that she herself and Benjamin had done so. She had questioned every traveler she met throughout the summer, pointing Molly out whenever she could and mentioning “the dead brother,” never suspecting that Tom knew more than he admitted and was already making his own quiet inquiries to travelers.
The rain stopped as briskly as it had come. Instead of freshening him up, it had spattered mud on his stockings and left him with the steaming, clingy weight of sodden clothes. The tavern stood before him, its stone foundation muddied like his legs, its clapboards deeply weathered by a thousand other rainfalls. To the right of where he stood, the storeroom and secondary bedrooms—an addition to the original building, one that predated even his parents’ ownership of the tavern—made an L-shaped enclosure in a portion of the yard. It was cozy and secluded, and it recalled him to his childhood and other rainy nights when he used to help his father with the horses in the stables.
So many memories of his father had an element of dark: a reassuring figure in the brightness of a door, a shadow in the barn, a body on the floor. After carrying the straw and mucking out the stalls, Tom would run toward the lantern in the kitchen—this very kitchen, with the very same lantern—and forget to take his shoes off. He remembered how his mother’s laugh lines sagged in disappointment when she turned to find him sullying her newly swept floor, and how she met him in the light, and lectured him again, but handed him a fresh-baked cracknell all the same.
He tasted caraway seeds and smelled the flour on her apron. This was home and there was more to it than licenses and sentiment. His father had died for it and his brother had abandoned it, but his mother had lived for the Orange and given it to Tom, and neither governor nor grief would take it from his hands.
Chapter Twenty
Later that night, after everyone had gone, Molly found Tom alone in the taproom. He sat at a table near the window and watched a shower of rain. A lone, stumpy candle in the middle of the room was scarcely bright enough to qualify as illumination, and the saturated heat was like the air beneath a blanket.