Outlawed(68)

At that moment, Texas was driving the wagon in at a leisurely pace along the town’s back streets, dressed in the cheap hat and waxed mustache of a traveling salesman. In case anyone stopped her, the back of the wagon was packed with an assortment of cheap cotton and cracked pottery purchased from Nótkon at a steep discount, which we’d jettison to make room for the gold.

Once the fire was set, Agnes Rose, News, Elzy, and I would enter the bank through the front door. We were dressed as young housewives in bonnets and cotton frocks. We would engage the clerks in complex financial transactions, augmented by flirtation, while Lark and Cassie simply strolled through the lobby of the bank into the side room where the vault sat, unguarded and ready to be blown wide open. As soon as we heard the sound, the four of us in the front of the bank would draw our pistols from our petticoats and instruct the clerks to empty the tills. We’d load up the wagon and, if all went well, drive the horses back to Hole in the Wall with all the liquid assets of the Farmers’ and Merchants’ on their backs, while the sheriff and his posse fought the fire and the clerks tried to understand what had just happened to them.

“I feel sorry for the butcher,” I said, hesitating with the matchbook in my hands. “He never did anything to us.”

“He’ll smell the smoke long before he’s in any danger,” Agnes Rose said. “He won’t get hurt.”

“He’ll lose his shop,” I said.

“Think about it this way,” Agnes Rose said. “If you were climbing the steps to the gallows in the town square right now, about to be hanged for a witch, do you think the butcher would raise a hand to help you? Or do you think he’d be cheering with all the rest?”

“Everybody cheers the hanging of a witch,” I said.

Agnes Rose looked at her dainty watch.

“Everybody but us,” she said, and she took the matches from me and set one of the ledgers alight.

The fire caught with shocking speed. One moment it played with the corners of the pages and the next it engulfed an entire column of ledgers—decades of beef prices and chicken sales, measures of flesh and bone, consumed by flames in an instant. Agnes Rose and I watched it burn for a moment; then we turned and walked out of the shop.

News and Elzy were on Main Street already, pretending to evaluate the petticoats in the window of Madame Trumbull’s. Elzy wore a blonde wig with her bonnet and a light brown dress cinched close around her narrow waist. Both of them walked differently from the way they did at Hole in the Wall; their steps, as they spotted us and proceeded into the bank, had a careful, tentative quality that, to me, was both familiar and strange. Another woman passed by in the opposite direction with the same peculiar gait, and I recognized it: the walk of women in public, who know they are being watched.

The inside of the bank was very beautiful. The lobby was not large, but it had been made to look more spacious by means of a high vaulted ceiling, on which was painted a blue sky with clouds and cherubs in the old European style. The floor was marble tile, alternating between white with gray veins and black shot through with the subtlest hint of gold. It had probably been salvaged from the house of some rich man felled by Flu—or perhaps the bank had been his house, one of the many cleared of corpses and put to new use in the years and decades that followed the disease. Perhaps the wealth of Fiddleback today was kept in the same room where the wealthiest resident of some prior town had breathed his last some hundred years ago.

On one side of the lobby were four clerk windows behind a high counter—as Henry had said, only two of the windows were manned. On the other side of the lobby was an open corridor leading to the bank’s back offices and the vault. The corridor and the windows faced one another, so that the clerks could easily see anyone passing into the corridor—we would have to see to it that their attention was occupied elsewhere.

So far, the clerks appeared to be having a quiet morning. One, his red hair grown long and unkempt over his ears, his glasses marked with fingerprints, was giving an old man in a grocer’s apron change for a silver piece in coppers. The other was using an emery board to file his nails. Agnes Rose and I queued up behind the grocer, while Elzy went straight for the fastidious clerk, and News fell in line behind her. I was relieved. With two people ahead of me, one of them Agnes Rose, it was unlikely I would have to put my powers of distraction to the test.

“I’d like to open a savings account for my son,” Elzy said to the clerk with the nail file. He was young and handsome, clearly proud of his appearance—his blond mustache and beard were as carefully tended as his nails. Over his crisp white shirt he wore a pair of red suspenders.

“Very good, ma’am,” he said to Elzy. “To start, I’ll need his name.”

“He doesn’t have a name,” Elzy said.

“I beg your pardon?” the clerk asked.

From where I stood behind Agnes Rose, I could clearly see the bank’s front door and the foot traffic on the street outside. Any moment, I knew, Lark would enter, and from that moment he would be in danger, from which it would fall to me, at least in part, to protect him. I was surprised by the force of my fear for him. I had never felt such a thing for my first husband, my spouse before my family and the law. But of course, I had never had cause to fear for him—I could not imagine him in Lark’s place now, just as I could not compare any aspect of my old life to its counterpart in the new. The two were connected only by my body, and the failing within it that had made the old life impossible and ushered the new one in.