Free Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney Page B

even fatal.
    “She’s like our mother,” Molly said.
    “But she is not!” Bell erupted. “Your mother died fourteen years ago.”
    “So did you,” Nicholas said.
    Bell struck him backhand, cutting his cheek with a ring and knocking him down with fearful ease. Molly ran to hold him, Nicholas hugged her back, and they protected each other in a knot of hands and elbows. Bell loomed above them, his gleaming boot tainted with the horse’s stale urine and his nostrils flaring open, audible and vulgar.
    “I hate you,” Molly said. “You’re awful, I despise you.”
    Bell was startled by her vehemence and backed toward the door. The frame boxed him in, both confining and enlarging him. “If your defiance has resulted from an overwarm attachment to your governess,” he said with overwrought composure, “I am required to warn Frances’s new employers, who have children of their own and may object—”
    “No,” Molly said, clenching up tight. “No, it’s us. Only us.”
    “Very well,” Bell said.
    Nicholas remained silent, his face so immobile as to resemble the plaster death masks he’d studied as a child, causing Bell to shiver as he pivoted, exited the room, and left his son and daughter huddled on the floor.
    *   *   *
    Molly appealed to her father incessantly. She waylaid him on the stairs, and in the stables, and at the end of each day in his private room where he was bound to return, exhausted and irritable, to face yet another of her heartfelt pleas. His usual response being silence or avoidance, she resorted to flagrant disobedience—refusing to pack for their journey back to the city, failing to change her clothes or tidy her hair, and most of all knocking, and calling, and singing childish songs whenever she encountered a locked room and knew that he was just beyond the door.
    It was no use. Lord Bell put her off without acknowledgment or rage, ordering servants to pack her bags as she pursued him through the house, until she finally despaired and ceased to badger him completely, spending all the time she could in the company of Frances.
    Nicholas appealed to the staff, taking his time with each and wringing their hearts with recollections of Frances’s qualities—her kindness, her reliability, and her advocacy, at one time or another, on every servant’s behalf—to rally their support. Lord Bell was unaccustomed to revolt; perhaps great dissent would force him to reconsider, if only to ensure law and order in the home. But Nicholas’s words had the opposite effect, reminding everyone from the grooms to the maids that even a woman as peerless as Frances wasn’t guaranteed the favor of their master. The servants doubled their efforts to appease Lord Bell and keep themselves secure, leaving Nicholas and Molly unsupported in rebellion.
    Frances took the news with remarkable aplomb. According to Newton the footman, who overheard the conversation, she remained completely silent as Bell explained the reason for her dismissal. Instead of panicking or pleading, Frances overcame her shock and then replied, softly balanced, that of course she understood: whatever was best for the family. Newton watched her leave the study, dry-eyed and poised, but she kept to her room for much of the following day, refusing meals and denying access even to Molly and Nicholas when they knocked. She revealed herself after dinner the next night, sitting in the drawing room for her customary hour with the siblings. She slumped as if a structure in her body had collapsed. Her skin was wan from hunger, her eyes were dark and raw, and although she smiled and insisted she would weather the ordeal, the draining of her spirit seemed to indicate a fate much graver than dismissal, like an illness that would steadily disintegrate her bones.
    She held herself together until the morning of her departure, when the siblings carried her bags to meet the carriage that would take her out of their lives. Lord Bell had said goodbye