that she was married curdled in his stomach.
“Pitt’s riding out to find the man who knew your husband.”
The statement cut her legs. She sat beside him, slumping forward. For a moment he believed she would vomit on the floor.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Then tell me everything,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My name is Molly Bell,” she said. “I’m General Bell’s daughter.”
Tom was on her right, their legs a ways apart but inching closer as the mattress sagged. She’d chosen to sit on the side of the bed nearer to the window and could just discern his features as she watched him at an angle, keeping her own expression shadowed and her panic in the dark.
She tried to read his mind: The man I shared a drink with. Impossible. A lie. She might have told him she was royalty or born of noble wolves. He widened his eyes and leaned away, squinted, and examined her. His disbelief shifted to a dumbfounded awe and she was trapped again, compelled by his acceptance to continue.
Unable to start at the end, the part she feared to tell, she started with her birth and how the bleeding killed her mother, speaking to the floor and painfully constricted. Tom didn’t talk. He didn’t once interrupt. She sensed his thoughts reconfiguring with every new fact, his inner ears spiraling with every new turn.
She told of her childhood in Umber, and of Nicholas and Frances, till the loneliness the memories enkindled made her falter. How her father went to war and left them in the care of Mrs. Wickware and Jeremy; how they suffered and rebelled; how their father came home and threatened to divide them; how they fled amid the riot and escaped aboard the Cleaver. Tom gestured more than once because her voice kept rising. She tried to quiet down but her spirit wouldn’t let her, and her words bubbled out, strong and effervescent. She told him the false names they adopted for the journey. She described Mr. Fen’s molestations in the cot and how he vanished in the storm with the purse full of money.
Tom was already conversant with their early days in Grayport. She paused to let him play it through his memory again, now with Nicholas and Molly in their artificial marriage. They had met Kofi Baa and settled in the city, Molly translating, Nicholas doing business in the parlor, and the locket thief had visited her brother in the night.
It was here the truth began and where the crux of it was hidden. Molly took a breath that seemed to go forever, as if her body were a chasm with the world falling in.
* * *
Day upon day, for much of the spring and far too much of early summer, Molly sat with quill and paper in the quiet brown room while interesting strangers—men and women, young and old, most of obvious affluence—passed by her desk to meet her brother in the back.
“They require anonymity,” Nicholas told her more than once.
She spoke with them as long as they would allow. Some ignored her. Others humored her—Mr. Bole was always voluble and happy to converse—but she was never able to glean the nature of their visits.
Nicholas’s health was enviably strong, as if his work were not depleting him but curing him of weakness. It was Molly who was pale and tired in the mornings. She was cramped and inky-fingered, scratching out letters, and although she counted her blessings after such a frightful winter, there came a point when gratitude was not enough to sate her. Nothing seemed as gorgeous as the street beyond the window or as vivid as a sun-kissed stranger passing by.
Molly longed to socialize but Nicholas forbade it.
“Father may have sent men from Umber to discover us,” he said. “We must confine ourselves to necessary interactions.”
“Why did we escape, if not to live however we choose?”
“It’s only for a time,” Nicholas assured her.
Weeks passed. Months. Nicholas grew cagier than ever about his dealings, instructing Molly to avoid not only conversation with his visitors but eye contact, too; and indeed, many who came to the office looked embarrassed to have come. A lady might pass several times before opening the door. A gentleman would fumble with his hat or stammer words. Regulars ignored her altogether when they entered; Molly might have been a candlestick for all that they acknowledged her. Sometimes, irked, she greeted them effusively, asking the leeriest visitors direct questions about their business and commenting on the wigs, hats, cloaks, and