The Crafters Book Two (31 page)

Mrs. Gentry pursed her lips, and patted the bandage into place. “I think she cares what becomes of you. Goodness knows you’ve made it difficult. But I think she’s equal to you and whatever you’ve done.”

“I think she’s better than that,” Madeleine said. “When I was watching from inside, it felt that it was happening to someone else. She was wonderful. She always remained calm, as though she’d done it before. I wonder if she has.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Mrs. Gentry began, and stopped. “But I can’t think of a woman I know who would admit that it happened to her. I have no intentions of speaking about that day to anyone else, and I think it wise that you do not, either. There’s something uncanny about those women. If you don’t want to go back, you shouldn’t.”

“But I do,” Madeleine protested. “There’s so much more I want to learn. There are certainly subjects in which she is expert that are not on the syllabus.” She half closed her eyes, peering speculatively at the ceiling through her eyelashes. Already, she was beginning to calculate the advantage her newfound know ledge could gain her.

Mrs. Gentry was outraged. “Madeleine, you were nearly killed. Any feeling person would leave well enough alone. You are incorrigible.”

Madeleine opened innocent blue eyes at her. “Mother, you wouldn’t want me to change, would you? I thought you sent me to Miss Crafter for an education. I’d say I’ve only learned part of the lessons she has to offer.”

Missouri

Anno Domini 1834

Many things attracted those who settled the American frontier. For some it was the opportunity to acquire land, or amass a fortune. For others, it was a way of escaping debts, or even fleeing the law. In many cases they succeeded in building a new life. Nat Singer was the direct descendant of Amer Crafter and inherited many of the family’s most powerful gifts. He fled West when, for all his skill, he could not avert the one tragedy he feared most. And, perhaps, to get away from his unnatural abilities, which now seemed to him more a curse than a gift, Talents that only reminded him of what he had lost. Trouble was, traveling a thousand miles to the edge of a civilization doesn’t give you any more distance from that which is a part of yourself.

In early June, 1834, a stranger walked into the southern Missouri town of Oak Bluffs leading a big chestnut horse. The chestnut was limping badly, favoring his left forefoot. The stranger was a tall man in his early thirties. He had a short black beard, and wore a floppy black felt hat with a wide brim, such as you see further west of here. Although he was dressed in frontier style, in buckskin and moccasins, his skin was curiously pale and unweathered. His hands showed no sign of hard use; they were more like the hands of a clerk than an outdoorsman. Just within the town, a boy of ten or so stared as though he’d never seen a man on foot before.

“Hey, mister! How come you’re walking?”

“Horse came up lame.”

“So you’ll be wanting another horse?”

“Looks that way.” He looked at the kid and liked what he saw: a tow-haired boy with a freckled country face. The man’s severe features broke into a smile. “I suppose you got one to sell?”

“No, sir, I ain’t got no horse to sell. But I know where you can git one.”

The frontiersman found a nickel in his pocket, flipped it to the kid.

“All right, son, tell me about it.”

The kid grinned. “Masterson’s livery stable, just right next door to where you’re standing.”

The man had seen the livery stable sign for himself. The kid was a wiseguy. But he had a soft spot in his heart for wiseguy kids, having been one himself, way back when he’d lived in Boston. Where he was going he didn’t expect to see any more kids like that very soon.

“Thanks a lot,” he said.

The stranger took a few steps, entered the livery stable and made his request to the leather-aproned man shoeing an old dray horse.

“Sorry, mister,” the proprietor said. “I’ll be glad to take in your horse. But I ain’t got no fit replacement.”

“Can you tell me where I can find one?”

The liveryman shrugged. “You could try some of the ranches around here, I suppose. Not that it would do you any good.”

“Why’s that?”

“I know most of the stock within fifty miles of here, and there’s nothing for sale you’d be interested in. Still, there could be some new horseflesh I haven’t seen.”

“I’ll check anyway. But not on this lady.” He patted the mare’s neck.

The liveryman thought for a moment. “I’ll put up your horse as long as you like. And I’ve got a mule I could rent you. Flo’s not very quick-like but she’s good enough to get you around.”

When the stranger came out of the livery stable leading a mule, the boy was waiting.

“No horse?” the boy asked innocently.

“Nope. He didn’t have one that was suitable. I suppose you didn’t know that.”

The boy looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, mister. I guess I did know. But I wanted that nickel.”

“Nothing wrong with that. But you can earn it now. Do you think you can find me a place I can sleep for a night or two while I wait for a horse to turn up?”

“Sure, mister! My ma lets rooms and she’s the best cook in Oak Bluffs!”

The boy started out at a trot. The man followed more slowly, leading the mule.

* * *

As the pair approached the white farmhouse, much like other farmhouses in those parts, the boy took off at a run. He raced up the wood plank stairs to his house, across the wide porch, through the dark wood door with a half-moon window, and was gone.

In a few minutes he reappeared on the porch, hand in hand with a tall woman. A dress of linsey-woolsey draped her ample figure. A white scarf knotted her smooth red hair at the nape of the neck. She smiled. Her face was lovely, albeit careworn.

She quickly assessed the stranger, liking what she saw. “Billy says you’re looking for a place.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man answered. He awkwardly removed his hat, shifting from one foot to the other. “My name is Nat Singer. I can’t pay much. Got to save my money for a horse. But I’ve got two strong hands and a liking for work. I’d be happy to take up the chores and whatever else for my lodging.”

Well, the money would have been nice, but Emma could use someone to milk the cows, clean out their stalls, and help deliver the butter and cheese into the town proper.

She nodded. “Looks like you’ve found yourself a room.”

* * *

Emma looked Nat Singer over and she mostly liked what she saw. He was a good-looking man, just a couple of years older than her. There was a certain refinement about him, almost a softness which was refreshing after too much exposure to the rawhided, salty, and profane men of the West. There was something else about Nat Singer, something not so nice lurking behind his soft black beard and earnest brown eyes. But no one’s perfect. Emma decided Nat looked fine to do the chores around the place, which had been piling up ever since Lemuel Skelly’s death. He’d been the last hired hand, and the Shoshone had picked him off one time when he’d been riding over toward Devil’s Lake looking for stray steers. Now the Shoshone were mostly gone from the land. People said the Kiowa had displaced them, and the Kiowa had a bad name, especially after the mess they’d caused in Kansas. But they weren’t mostly seen around here and so no one paid them much mind.

* * *

And so Nat Singer began work on Emma Hawkins’ farm.

Emma raised dairy cows, and provided about a quarter of Oak Bluffs’ milk. She also churned some of it into butter. Her vegetable garden grew tomatoes and zucchini and string beans. She raised some of the best strawberries in the state. She had a good-sized pigpen and did her own slaughtering, assisted by one of the drunkards from town. She kept her own counsel.

Nathaniel Singer was the second oldest son of Martin and Fay Singer. Martin was a descendant of Amer Crafter, who had brought his supernormal talents to the Colonies from England in the early years of the seventeenth century. The Crafters were a family of some distinction: people with exceptional talents in witchcraft.

All the Crafters did not follow the family tradition of magic.

Some turned their back on the trade. Others, like Nat, had an ambiguous and uneasy relationship with the occult arts.

A wild youth, highly intelligent but headstrong, and with a strong inherited talent for witchcraft, Nat had grown up in Salem and witnessed the Puritan excesses of its citizens. Experimentation in witchcraft had brought him great successes at first. And then came the incident when his magic couldn’t help, when he’d lost his wife, Agatha. Nat decided that New England, with its crabbed spirit and intolerant ways, was not for him. He dreamed of going West, toward room and freedom from dogma.

His feelings about magic were violent and ambivalent. He hated it but was drawn to it. This led him into a series of lucid dreams. His dreaming brought him frequent visions of that mysterious unknown Western country to which he was going. There were great expanses of dun-colored land under an enormous sky that seemed larger, more pellucid, than those that overarched New England. In his visions he saw great prairies and deserts, and cliffs of many colors. He could see the great bend of a river. The place was hot and dry. There was cactus and juniper. The sun was brilliant, merciless, all-seeing, unforgiving. There were Indians in this land and they were different from the Iroquois and Hurons he had known. They did not shave their heads like the northern tribes. Their dark hair was shoulder-length, and they bound it back with colorful headbands. They were horsemen who had been fighting the Spanish for over a century.

Those savage horsemen were still far away. Nat thought about them, and so the quiet days passed, and Oak Bluffs seemed a peaceable place. But it was soon after this that he began to pick up the scent of something wrong. At first he didn’t want to acknowledge it. If his sense was right, there could be trouble, spiritual trouble of the sort he was trying to move away from. He’d left the difficult problems of innocence and evil behind him. He was going to a new place, a place that did not know the demons and dangers of the Old World. Agatha and he had dabbled once too often in that. Now he had to move fast. He didn’t want to stay in this place. Something smelled bad here. There was an almost palpable sense of evil in this place. Bad things were going to happen here. But he wouldn’t be here when they happened. That was certain.

Nat was supposed to make himself useful. It was evident that he didn’t know beans about farm life. It was plain that he was a city man. But he was willing to turn his hand to whatever came up, and he was quick to learn. The first task was rail-splitting, and then fence-mending. Some of the cows had been escaping from the southern pasture. This fence had to be built up at once. The rail-splitting was tough work for a man who wasn’t born and bred to it, but Nat quickly picked it up. He was inexperienced, but clever with his hands. Things had a way of coming together nicely under his long, blunt fingers. Billy, who followed him around and watched him, marvelled at how quickly the city man was able to accustom himself to farm life.

Nat found the work pleasant and not too onerous. He had long wanted a practical introduction to what he had encountered before, only theoretically, in books studied at Harvard.

Although most forms of farm work seemed pleasant to him, one chore was somewhat irksome. The widow had decided just weeks before he’d come that a new cesspool had to be dug below and to the right of the existing one. The old one was filled to overflowing, and had been further flooded by recent rains. The new one, marked out in somewhat firmer soil, would be a long-term job, taking one man most of the summer.

After a few hours of backbreaking work, wrenching out the granite lumps that this land seemed to be composed of, Nat mopped his brow and sat back to consider if there might not be a better way to go about this.

It was a fine afternoon. The sun was already halfway down the sky. Billy wasn’t with him today. The widow had been sending the boy to the new school started by an itinerant preacher. Nat surveyed the land, then took out his billfold. He sat down on a little bluff, made himself comfortable, and began searching through it. At last he found what he was looking for. It was a scrap of parchment he’d gotten from the Boston Common Copying Room. On it was a list of names, none of them likely to be familiar to most people.

He read it.
Endymore.
That was the one he wanted.

He paused and looked around. He was alone. He didn’t like what he was about to do. He reminded himself that he’d sworn not to go back to the old ways. He was going to a new country, and was giving up the old ways. But the pit was very difficult to dig. And there was no one around. So ...

It took but a moment to trace the pentagram in the dirt.

Several twigs, cleverly bent and joined, served as the focus figures. He was harder pressed to find the pinch of manna dust. It wasn’t the sort of thing one carried around every day. At last, searching around the floor of the meadow, he found a mole’s lair, and within it, some fine powdering dust left by the female from her recent heat. He sprinkled this around the pentagram, and then began the chant. His words rose, thin and without timbre, in the bright June air. He felt the familiar sensation of queasiness in the pit of his stomach. The chant proceeded from his mouth, haltingly at first, for it had been a long time since he’d last invoked an earth spirit, but then with more celerity as the familiar pattern reasserted itself. After a little while he noticed a whirring in the air, like a tiny dust storm. It seemed to spin just out of his peripheral vision, tantalizingly close, yet refusing to be looked at. He didn’t try to focus on it. He knew from considerable experience how some spirits resist firm definition.

“Well, and who are you?” a voice said, somewhat crossly.

“My name is Nat Singer,” Nat said. “I stand under the protection of the seal.”

“Glad to hear it. Otherwise I would have blasted you. Why do you rouse me from my sleep? I was just having the most remarkable dream. In it I had been elected king of the Hindu pantheon of gods, and I was just deciding—”

“Excuse me,” Nat said. “I’d like to hear the story some other time. Right now I need to ask a favor.”

“Of course. Why else would you have called me up? All right, what is it?”

“You are a demon of the earth,” Nat said. “I would like you to move some earth for me.”

“One of those mountains, I suppose?” the spirit said.