Traitor to the Crown (3 page)

“If I wanted that, I would have done it myself,” Magdalena complained. She spoke in a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, her
W
’s sounding more like
V
’s, the
D
’s and
T
’s similarly swapped, and all the syllables of her words sharp and clipped.

“I wanted it,” Proctor answered, knowing the old woman never asked for anything.

Magdalena glared at him, but she rubbed her liver-spotted hands together and held them up to the flame until she sighed pleasantly. She shifted on her stool and looked around at Deborah.

“You are doing how?” she asked.

“My water has broken,” she said.

Proctor tensed. “What? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It just happened,” Deborah said. A puddle spread on the floor between her feet.

Magdalena rose and hobbled over to her side. “Good, this is very good, you are past the best time,” Magdalena
said. She poked her fingers against the tight end of her fist as a demonstration. “If this baby grows much larger, it won’t fit.”

The sound of that worried Proctor. The contractions during Deborah’s last miscarriage had been horrible, racking her body. It had been a childbirth for her in everything but outcome. “What should I do?” he asked.

“Go away,” Magdalena said. “This is women’s business.”

Deborah held out her hand. “Don’t go yet,” she said. “The contractions started just after lunch. It may be hours.”

So that was why she’d stopped early for the day. And of course, she hadn’t said anything.

“Leave,” Magdalena repeated, scowling at him.

“I’ll get Abigail and Lydia,” Proctor said, figuring out a compromise. They were women, and if this was women’s work, Magdalena couldn’t object. Then he could come back with them, which would make Deborah happy.

He stepped out the front door. A steady wind was blowing from the east. Abigail and Lydia sat in chairs on the porch watching the sunset color the sky red and orange to match autumn leaves. The two women were different from each other in almost every way, but somehow found enough in common that they had become close friends. Abigail, a big-boned girl, had her shirtsleeves rolled up and dirt on her hands. A basket overstuffed with fall turnips from the garden sat beside her where she’d dropped it. When she came to The Farm, they had called her Abby, but she had grown up in the past couple of years. Though she didn’t show it at the moment, rocking back and forth, grinning happily, her mouth still open in mid-sentence.

Lydia was as parsimonious with her opinions as Abigail was free with hers, though she had reasons to watch
what she said. She was a black woman probably about forty, a former slave who sometimes looked even older because her life had been hard. Her face was lean, with sharp cheekbones, and her limbs knotted with muscle. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders to keep her warm as she worked on knitting another blanket for the baby.

“Hey, Proctor,” Abigail said. “I was just saying to Lydia—doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

“Doesn’t what seem odd?” he asked.

“That we worked so hard to build up this place, adding extra rooms and gardens, and even a second outhouse—” She turned aside to Lydia and said, “There were more than a dozen of us living in the house I grew up in and we never had more than one outhouse”—then turned back to Proctor to finish her thought—“and now the whole place feels almost empty.”

It was true. Deborah had turned The Farm into a school for witches for several years, but now most of their students were gone. Ezra and Zoe had gone back to sea. Ezra had never forgiven Proctor for allowing the Covenant to kidnap Zoe, and Zoe had never forgiven Proctor for letting the Covenant escape with the orphan boy William. The cousins—stork-like Sukey and butter-ball Esther—had returned home to heal men wounded in the war. Alexandra Walker had rejected magic and disguised herself as a young man to fight the British with her brothers in the army. Other witches had shorter stays: Jane Irwin had studied for a few months and didn’t say five words unprompted the whole time, Edwina Chase had displayed an amazing talent with animals but left because the people made her anxious, and a Mrs. Richardson had arrived from South Carolina and departed the same day when she discovered Deborah’s mother was dead. Only the five of them were left.

Soon to be six.

“They’re going to fill up this place with children, I expect,” Lydia said as she knitted.

“I hope so,” Abigail said enthusiastically. “I love children.”

“That’s my hope too,” Proctor said. He knew that witches often had trouble bearing children. He and Deborah were both only children, even though all their neighbors had ten, fifteen, even twenty offspring. “We could be starting on that real soon. Deborah’s water broke.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Abigail snapped. She jumped up and punched him in the shoulder before she ran inside. Her family was the exception rather than the rule. Abigail’s mother had given birth to nine, though the talent for witchcraft ran weak in them, even Abigail, if it showed up at all.

“Aren’t you going to go inside to help with the childbirth?” Proctor asked. He couldn’t return to Deborah’s side until Lydia came in too, but he didn’t know how to tell her that.

Lydia rocked back and forth in place for a moment. “I’m not that interested in helping with childbirth, to be honest,” Lydia said. “It’s an awful lot of noise and mess that I don’t know nothing about.”

“I just assumed—” he started, and then cut himself off.

“You just assumed that because I’m a woman, I know that sort of thing,” Lydia said. “Well, I don’t. I served Miss Cecily from the time I was a child and she had no interest in making babies. The only other babies I had the chance to see born were slaves, and it was hard for me to do anything that’d bring more souls into slavery. Miss Cecily couldn’t stand the thought of letting anyone else have control of me, so I was never forced to the spot where I had to bear children of my own. And I’m glad. I don’t know if I could have brought them up without freedom.”

“I had no idea,” Proctor said, letting everything he’d heard sink in.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s better than fine,” he said. “How can I know things if you don’t tell me … Hey, hold on a minute. How could you be with Cecily since you were a child? You’re about ten years older than she is, aren’t you?”

“No, I am not. She’s been that same age as long as I knowed her, never a day older or younger, and not just ’cause she was vain about her appearance. It wasn’t natural. Her name’s not Sumpter or Pinckney either.”

“I remember you telling us that, but I assumed it was because she married.”

Lydia sighed. “No, she went by Cecily Aikens when I was a child, and there was a Master Aikens too, though I don’t recall as he was a relation. Then we moved and she changed her name to Hayne. She didn’t become a Sumpter and a Pinckney until we moved north.”

“When was that?”

“When we came to The Farm with orders to spy on Deborah’s mother.” She folded up her blanket and tucked the needles into it.

“How old is she really?” Proctor asked.

“She’s older than I care to think about,” Lydia said, squinting off at the horizon. “When she spoke to old folks, great-grandmothers and the like, she traded stories with them as if she’d been there. I remember one …” She trailed off. The wind rustled through the orchard, sending a cascade of leaves fluttering to the ground.

“What story?” Proctor asked.

“Oh, there was a rebellion of slaves on the Stono River, back forty years ago, and she talked about the slave Cato, he’s the one who led it, like she know every line on his face. I listened close to the stories about slave uprisings when I had the chance.”

“Did you have many chances?”

“No, not really. Just whispers, here and there. Everybody afraid to talk openly about it, ’cause it might mean people could die.”

“Sounds much like our talent, in that respect.”

“Yes it does,” she said. Crinkles formed at the corners of her eyes, and she smiled at Proctor. He thought it might be the first time he had ever seen her genuinely smile at him that way. “It was a lot like our talent.”

From inside the house came the sounds of furniture scraped across the floor—probably Abigail rearranging things just to have work to do. The sun had settled in the sky, taking most of the color with it. Only red remained, streaked across the horizon like blood smeared across pale white flesh.

Now, that was a morbid thought. He tried to shake it off. “I’ve never heard you talk about those times quite so much before.”

“You never seen me trying to put off helping with a childbirth,” Lydia said. She pushed her chair back and stood up.

“If you go inside though, I can follow you in and see Deborah,” he admitted.

“Why do you want to go and do that? Just so she can chase you out again?”

“Sure. It’ll give her something to do, between contractions.”

Lydia tucked the baby blanket under her arm and picked up Abigail’s basket of turnips. “We better go in and see how we can help.”

“Don’t even think about helping,” Proctor said. “If there’s some way to help, that means there’s something going wrong. And nothing’s going to go wrong, so nobody will need any help.”

“Uh-huh,” she murmured.

The wind gusted, cracking a branch heavy with fruit
from one of the trees at the edge of the orchard. It fell with a thump on a patch of dead ground, soil that had been barren ever since Cecily’s necromancy raised a corpse that had been buried there. Unripened apples tumbled into the dry grass as dark clouds gathered overhead.

It was not a bad omen. Proctor was in no mood to admit bad omens. “Looks like we’ve got extra fodder for the pigs,” he said, pulling open the door.

Lydia tugged her shawl tighter against her throat. “If you say so.”

All the furniture had been pushed to the edges of the room and neatly stacked out of the way. Deborah walked—no, waddled—around the open space, with Abigail supporting her on one side and Magdalena on the other. Magdalena, small and frail, supported herself with her cane, and looked as if she might topple under the weight. Proctor went to take her place, but Lydia put down the blanket and basket and got there first.

“Oh, you don’t need to do that—” Deborah protested, but the last word was interrupted by a wince as she felt another contraction.

“Just keep breathing through it,” Abigail said.

Deborah nodded and continued her small circuit of the room. Magdalena shuffled over to a chair and collapsed into it.

“What can I do to help?” Proctor asked.

All four women looked at him as if he had just asked them how to fly. “Maybe you could go check outside,” Magdalena said.

“Check for what?” he asked. “We’ve set spells protecting our borders against any physical intruders, man or animal, living or dead, accidental or intentional.” They’d learned their lesson after Bootzamon’s probing of their hideaway some years before. “It’s been over a year since we heard or saw any indication of the Covenant.”

Magdalena raised the knob end of her cane at him.

He threw up his hands in surrender. “I’ll go check the borders,” he said.

“Thank you,” Deborah said. She paused and smiled at him, but the effect was weakened by the sweat beading on her forehead.

Proctor grabbed a bucket and climbed the hill to the orchard to gather the fallen apples. Clouds rolled in, deepening the gloam before he’d gathered them all, and the wind whipped through the branches, threatening to break more limbs. He plucked a ripe apple and tucked it in his pocket for Singer, their mare, then took the rest and dumped them into the pig trough with their other kitchen scraps. Inside the barn, he rubbed Singer’s nose while she ate out of his hand and then checked the cows in their stalls. When he was done, he took a lantern from the wall and went outside.

He meant to light it with magic. He had almost mastered the talent, but he wasn’t going to make the attempt in the barn with all the straw around. Shielding the lantern with his body, he tried the spell that Deborah had taught him.

A prickling unease shivered through his skin the moment he spoke.

Before he could stop the spell, flame exploded from his hand, a ball of fire that hung suspended in the air. Wind swirled, drawing straw and grass up in a spiral to feed the flame. The new-fed fire, leashed to the ground, wavered toward the barn, then veered abruptly at the house.

Coming to his senses, Proctor kicked and stamped, scattering the dried grasses. Deprived of fuel, the flames quickly sputtered and died.

Hair prickled on the back of his neck, but he told himself he was imagining things. Worries about Deborah had him on edge. Still, he decided that he knew the land
well enough to walk it in the dark. He put the lantern down and set out to check the fences.

The Farm was hidden by an illusion that blurred its presence to passing eyes. To anyone on the other side of the fence, Proctor would seem no more than a stray shadow or a bobbing will-o’-the-wisp. There were physical barriers, thorny hedges just beyond the fence. Spells had also been set to discourage visitors from going any farther. If someone did press through the thorns and spells, their presence would set off warning bells. A variety of other protections would delay or trap them while the witches in the house responded to the warning.

In short, no man or creature not explicitly blessed or accepted by Deborah could approach them unawares. No wonder the Covenant had given up.

He finished his inspection at the gate, the weakest spot in their defenses, but he saw and sensed nothing unusual there, either. Satisfied, he passed through the gardens and returned to the house in the dark. The wind was as fitful as his mood, gusting and twisting along the ground in his wake.

Proctor entered the new wing so he wouldn’t disturb the women. He couldn’t wait until Deborah made up her mind to move into this part of the house. The main room was dominated by a huge fireplace built out of fieldstone and protected by an ancient spell that he and Deborah had performed on the day of their wedding.