Traitor to the Crown (2 page)

“What is it?” he snapped, turning and marching smartly out of the burning building. A crowd of his men had been watching from the door.

“Their colors,” the scout said. He held up the regimental flag of the rebels who’d been stationed here. “We found them in an officer’s bag, in one of the houses.”

“I’ll take that,” Tarleton said. The fire in the church burned vigorously, flames licking from the windows like tongues from the mouth of a demon. Tarleton held up the captured flag to the light for a better look. Thirteen red and white stripes on a field with a painted thundercloud. The thundercloud seemed very appropriate.

Someone had eased in close, looking over Tarleton’s shoulder.

A red coat. Tarleton reached out and grabbed an arm.

He was startled to find that he had a mere boy in his hand, with an angel’s face and no cap on his head. The coat he wore was a threadbare soldier’s jacket, something from the regulars, but cut for a drummer boy or fifer. It had holes shot through it and dark stains around the holes. The fire lit up the boy’s face, transforming it into something red and eerie.

He tilted his head to Tarleton. “Persuade Brown,” he whispered. “We can use his special talents.”

“Who are you?” Tarleton demanded.

“William Reed. I was assigned to your command.”

Tarleton didn’t remember that. He was certain he had no drummer boy on the rolls. Drummer boys were for infantry, not cavalry. “Somehow I doubt that very much.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t get in the way,” the boy said innocently. “You won’t notice me at all.”

“The hell I won’t,” Tarleton said. He had the niggling
sensation that the boy had been at the edge of his perception for the past day, like a shadow rising on the horizon.

Gunshots fired from the dark around them.

“Sir, the rebels are back,” the scout said.

Tarleton spun to answer the scout, then paused. He’d just been talking to someone, but who? He folded the flag and tucked it under his arm. He wanted to burn the whole town—for a brief second he had an urge to burn the whole country—but he shook off the feeling.

“We don’t want another Lexington on our hands,” Tarleton said, referring to the disastrous battle that had started the war. A night attack, an overextended line, and a slow retreat resulted in a British slaughter. “We have what we came for—it’s time to withdraw. Where’s my horse?”

“What about Lockwood?” the scout asked.

“We have their spymaster’s letters. Perhaps we’ll roll up another prize or two with those.”

Perhaps this fellow, Brown.

More gunshots cracked nearby. Wood splintered in the side of a house behind Tarleton. His aide handed him the lead to his horse, and he sprang into the saddle. Calling his men to follow, he led them away from the rebels’ camp.

As the road started to rise, Tarleton paused and looked back, letting the other men pass him so that he might admire his handiwork. The town filled a small bowl in the trees, which glowed red in the gray and soggy dawn.

No, not a bowl, Tarleton thought. A crucible. By this alchemy would the war be transformed.

He shook off the thought, wondering where it had come from. This wasn’t like him. He didn’t have orders to burn anything. What had possessed him to do it?

Laughter sounded nearby.

Tarleton turned to find it and glimpsed a drummer boy in a tattered red coat riding away with the last of his men. The poor boy didn’t even have a cap …

He spurred his horse past the other riders to take the lead.

Proctor Brown stood over the washstand and stared into the basin of pristine water. There had been a time when he would have used this bowl for scrying, to pull back the veil of days and peer into the shadows of the future. But he felt like every time he’d done that, it had led him astray. It was too easy to see what he wanted to see and to miss what he needed.

“What are you thinking about, darling?”

He lifted his head at Deborah’s voice. Deborah, his wife, the love of his life. The New England chill had arrived with the autumn, so she rested on a chair by the fire, with a blanket pulled up to her chin and her bare feet propped up on a stool. Her belly was as round as the pumpkins out in the field, and her feet and ankles were swollen like squash. Their first baby was due to be born any day.

“I was thinking it’s a shame to dirty this clean water,” he said lightly, holding up his large hands, dirty from cleaning up the stalls. “I’ll probably be the one who has to go out in the middle of the night to get more.”

“You aren’t coming near me with dirty hands,” Deborah threatened.

“Ah, well, then,” he said with a smile and plunged his hands into the cold water. He felt a sharp pain in his right hand, shooting through the scar of his missing pinkie finger. The finger had been cut off three years ago by a German necromancer who had hoped to enslave Proctor’s
soul. The prince-bishop—the only name they had for the necromancer—had escaped with both Proctor’s finger and a young witch, William Reed, whom Proctor had promised to rescue. The missing digit still ached. The memory of his failure to save the boy ached too.

Proctor shoved that memory aside while he scrubbed. He reminded himself that he was glad to be back on the farm. Before the war, all he wanted was his own home and family. He had done his duty and more, serving the young United States with his special talents in what ever capacity General Washington asked of him. But now, with a baby coming, he was ready to go back to his old life.

“Someday I’m going to add a room big enough for a whole tub of water,” he said, shaking his hands dry. “So we can bathe inside whenever we want.”

“Putting on airs, are we?” Deborah asked. Her tone was amused. “What ever happened to the simple farm boy I fell in love with?”

“I’m still that same fellow,” Proctor said, though he knew it was but a partial truth. He grabbed a towel and wiped his hands dry, feeling the still-strange scrape of the homespun fabric over the scarred nub of his missing finger. “Only now I’d like a tub indoors.”

“There’s no room for it,” Deborah said.

“Maybe.” Proctor smiled. He and Deborah lived in the old part of the house. Deborah loved the old house because it reminded her of her mother and father. It had one big space, which served as kitchen and common room with a hearth at one end. There were three doors: the front door, which opened onto the porch; the back door, which connected to the new addition; and the bedroom door near the hearth. The bedroom—or sleeping parlor, as they were called in old houses—was a room barely big enough for a bed.

He glanced at the hearth near the bedroom. It had
been used as a black altar by one of their enemies, which made Proctor uneasy, but if living in the old house near that tainted hearth made Deborah happy, then Proctor would do it. Someday, when she changed her mind, he would put a tub in the sleeping parlor. It would be a short journey to carry hot water from the hearth to the tub. Maybe enough water would clean away the bad memories from that attack.

“You’re trying to change the subject,” Deborah said. “But I can tell when you’re lost in your thoughts, and you are more lost than a baby crawling through the forest.
What
are you thinking about?”

He tossed the towel aside and kissed her on the forehead. “I was thinking about you.” He rested his right hand on her belly. “And our baby. But no forests.”

She tilted her head up at him and smiled. “Are your hands clean now?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Can you please rub my feet?”

“But my hands are clean now,” he protested. As she gave him a mock scowl, he pulled up a chair and pressed his thumbs into her sole. Deborah leaned back and sighed. She was past nine months pregnant, due any day, and it had finally caught up with her. Today must have been an especially bad day, because she’d quit working shortly after lunch. She winced unexpectedly, and he let go of her feet.

“No, please, keep rubbing,” she said.

“But—” he protested.

“Keep rubbing,” she insisted, so he cupped her foot in his hand and continued, but with a lighter touch than before. After a moment she shifted position, sighed, and relaxed again. “What’s making you pensive?” she asked.

Her powers had grown during her pregnancy. She
seemed to see farther and clearer than ever before. Although it didn’t take talent to see through him now. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Is it Washington’s letter?”

General Washington’s letter asking Proctor to serve again—and to go overseas to do it—could not have come at a worse time. Or rather, letters. There was one from Washington, another from Tallmadge, his spymaster, plus letters of introduction for Proctor to use in the mission. It was as though they took his service for granted.

Proctor stared out the window. In the four years since he’d moved to The Farm—he heard the capital letters in his head whenever he thought the phrase—Proctor had rebuilt a run-down spread into something special. With Ezra’s help, they’d built a new addition that was bigger than the original house, repaired and repainted the barn, built a new chicken coop, and dug new privies. There were new rows of trees in the orchard on the hills in back, larger gardens stretching down the hill in front, cornstalks in the field that he had converted from fallow land, and new fences ringing the pastures. And he had done all of that in bits and pieces, in between the months that he spent serving the patriot cause.

“I belong here with you,” Proctor said. “I’m not going across the ocean, not for Washington or anybody. Not with you expecting. I served in the militia, I did my time as a minuteman—”

“Any man can serve in the militia, Proctor. You do things that no one else can do.”

“I know, but—” Deborah winced again, and he realized the tension was making his grip on her feet too strong. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should stop.”

“No, it’s all right,” Deborah said when she caught her breath. “This is helping me greatly.”

“It’s just that there’s almost peace already,” Proctor
argued, lightening his touch again. “There hasn’t been a major battle since Monmouth, and that was almost a year and a half ago. The war’s over, all but the skirmishing.”

“And what about the raids in New York? The town that was burned?”

The burning had shocked them all. “That was an aberration, a onetime thing.”

She sighed and shifted again. “Maybe. But what about the Covenant?”

They had seen very little sign of the Covenant since the battle at Trenton. At first, Proctor just assumed they had retired to regroup. But now it had been more than two years. “They’ve given up.”

Deborah caught her breath and frowned, a sure sign she was about to disagree. After a moment’s pause, she said, “The Covenant has been around for hundreds of years, thousands if we believe what the widow Nance told us. When you spend that much time pursuing a goal, a year or two is nothing. Sometimes it takes a year or two of study to prepare a major spell. Besides, practicing witches, especially powerful witches, are good at hiding their activities. They have to be, just to survive. I know because I grew up around practicing witches.”

Proctor always felt a little envious of Deborah’s upbringing when he thought about his own mother and the way she’d made him ashamed of being a witch, frightened of everything bad that could happen to them. He didn’t hold it against Deborah; he wanted to bring up their child in a house hold like Deborah’s. But his own background had taught him a thing or two as well.

“Maybe I didn’t grow up around practicing witches, but I’ve spent some time around the army,” he said. “The British army is spread too thin. They’ll never be able to push inland from the coast and beat the Continental army. The Covenant can’t win the war that way.
We’re too far away from Europe, for the British or the Covenant. What ever the Covenant’s grand plan is, they’ve decided to find a different way to pursue it. They don’t care what happens here.”

“That sounds like wishful thinking.”

“No, it’s just a cold assessment of the facts.” He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m saving all my wishes for our baby.”

“Are you worried?” she asked.

He couldn’t bring himself to lie and say no or to admit the truth. She’d miscarried twice already, once when she was six months pregnant, producing a stillborn boy, small as a kitten. Luckily, they’d had Magdalena to help Deborah back to health. The old Dutch woman had a gift for helping pregnancies and for birthing. He sat there, quietly rubbing his wife’s ankles.

“Coward,” she said. “I’m worried. There, I said it.”

“Shhh,” he hushed her. “Don’t make bad things true by wishing them so.”

“You could do a scrying,” she said. “That is your talent, above all others.”

Scrying. Years ago, Proctor’s witchcraft had manifested itself unbidden as scrying. It came naturally to him and was the only thing he’d known how to do until he met other witches. With Deborah’s help, he had learned other, more powerful types of spells—how to set protective shields, how to create illusion or alter memory, how to move and transform objects. Simple, direct, unambiguous magic. When he thought about it, he was amazed at how far he’d come. The more he learned, the less he used his scrying.

“If the news that scrying would give me is good, then there’s no need to see it,” he said. “If the news is bad, then there’s nothing I can do to change it and I would rather not know.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“We’ll answer the door when the future knocks and not before.”

She lowered her feet slowly to the floor, spread them apart, and grunted uncomfortably. She made noise whenever the baby grew active. It was very active tonight.

The back door opened, and Magdalena entered from the new addition where she lived with the other student witches. The last four years had been hard on the old Dutch woman from Pennsylvania. Already stooped with age, she had never fully recovered from the Covenant’s attack on The Farm years ago. She used a cane to steady herself. The basket she carried had only a few small apples in it, and yet she struggled with the weight. She set the basket down on the table and hobbled over to the hearth, where she pulled up a stool and held out her hands to the coals to warm them. Proctor rose and added wood to the fire, stirring the coals until the wood crackled in the flames.