Traitor to the Crown (37 page)

“My daughter, yes,” Proctor said.

The king reached out and patted him on the arm. He seemed at a loss for words, reaching up to wipe a knuckle at the corner of each eye. The demon on his shoulder had a furtive, trapped look about it now.

“I would like to be present for what ever else you do,” the king said. He clapped his hands on his knees.

“Do you want to take a break—prepare for another day?” the priest asked.

“Let’s be done with it,” he said. To Proctor, “Can you do this?”

The demon began to thrash and struggle, trying to pull its arm free of the king’s head.

“Sire,” Shelburne said. “Did you clearly hear the consequences?”

Proctor guessed that the loss of reason was something Shelburne feared more than death.

“Madness and pain,” the king said. “I’d rather not go into the details. But I remain my own man and England’s king.”

The priest handed Proctor the silver knife. He drew it across the scar on his hand. Let the wounds that the Covenant had given him be their undoing. He grabbed the demon’s wrist with his ringed hand. The creature slashed and bit at him, tearing open real wounds in his flesh. The physical world and the spirit world were as one.

Proctor stabbed the bloody knife into the demon’s arm where it touched the king’s skull.

“Oh,” said the king. “I feel that.”

Proctor ignored him, sawing all the way through the arm. The demon yowled in rage. The instant Proctor severed its arm the sound vanished. The demon’s arm slipped out of Proctor’s grip as it floated away. A bright white light appeared in the room and the creature turned to smoke, then disappeared.

As he watched it go, Proctor wondered if he could do the same thing to Deborah and Maggie if they were only partially possessed. Could he condemn them to a life of suffering to free them from a demon?

Could he free them any other way if they were entirely possessed?

The priest stared at Proctor as if waiting to see what he would do next.

Proctor tossed him the silver knife and said, “God save the king.”

The priest took Proctor aside. “What you did here today was remarkable. Have you ever considered a career in the priesthood?”

Proctor was taken aback. “I have a wife and a daughter,” he said.

“That is no barrier in the Church of England,” the priest said.

“But I’m not English.”

“Are you Christian?”

“Of course.”

“That is all that matters. You must realize that your wife and daughter are in terrible danger.” When Proctor tensed, the priest held up his hand. “I speak not of anything specific, nor to be cruel, but to prepare you for the unhappy fact.”

Proctor did not need anyone to feed his fears for Deborah and Maggie. It was too easy to imagine Maggie as a blood sacrifice and Deborah possessed by Balfri.

“You may return home to find them not as you remember them,” the priest said. “If you find them. You may not find them at all. A life of service would be a fitting tribute to their memory.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

The priest blinked. Recovering, he offered Proctor a melancholy smile. “Nothing has ever happened to me,” he said. “You must remember that I have no name. I am no one.”

“Thank you, but all I want to do is return home.”

“Please consider sending a letter to the office of special secretary at Canterbury if you ever change your mind.”

“How will it reach you, if you are no one.”

“Because the office is always there,” the priest said. “Your letter will reach someone.”

The other men had joined them. King George spoke quietly to Lord Gordon. “I w-w-will see that you have the best legal minds to advise and represent you. But you-you-you must go to the Tower and you m-m-must go to trial.”

Gordon’s face was grave. He glanced at the king’s head where the demon had been amputated, then looked at the ground. “Yes, sir.”

Shelburne stood with his hands behind his back, staring Proctor in the eye. “It is my goal to render your kind powerless. When men no longer believe in magic, sorcerers like Dee will not be able to channel the untapped talent of ordinary men to evil purposes.”

“I don’t believe that will ever happen,” the priest said.

“W-w-we must all work to elevate reason,” the king said.

Proctor watched the others seem to let that stand as the last word, but he was not content. “So how do we go after Dee now? I want to go with you.”

“Dee and his followers have left the country,” Shelburne said.

“It’s why we finally considered it safe to bring His Majesty here,” the priest said.

“Where have they gone?” Proctor asked.

King George seemed almost apologetic. “I-I-I assumed that you knew. They’ve gone to Am-m-merica.”

Grueby brought a shay around from Shelburne’s stables, and offered Proctor a hand up to the seat. “Lord
Gordon has commanded me to deliver you to the destination of your choice,” he said.

“There’s a farm outside Salem, in the state of Massachusetts,” Proctor said.

“I believe he meant within the vicinity of London.”

“I have to find a ship to America,” Proctor said.

“There’s a place down near the docks that I believe will suit,” Grueby said. He snapped the reins, and the spritely gray mare clopped off through the streets.

Proctor was lost in thought about his next steps. It might be best to find some way back to France, maybe with some of the smugglers whom Digges knew. From France, he could surely find an American ship or at least a ship bound for America.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Grueby said as they rolled through the streets. “How exactly did you turn the spell and escape from the Tower? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“I’d better keep that secret, in case I ever need it again.”

Grueby nodded. “Gordon was convinced that you were a member of the Covenant. He thought they would come visit you in prison. I was to wait and spy on you to see if they came. The goal was to follow them back to their residence.”

“And after eight months?” Proctor said.

“I don’t blame you for being bitter,” Grueby said, keeping his eyes on the road. “I just wanted to explain. I was coming for you today because our plans changed with Dee’s departure. He just appeared in a carriage at the docks and hired a merchant ship to America for himself and several passengers.”

“And you were simply going to tell the guards that I was the wrong man and they would have set me free?”

Grueby was silent as the blocks rolled past. The carriage had excellent springs. Proctor thought he had never
had a smoother ride. They had passed from the London of mansions in classical styles unknown in America through streets lined with spacious homes, modest by comparison, that rivaled the best his homeland had to offer, and had come to the kind of buildings one found everywhere he’d been yet, slapped-together structures that seemed to stand up by leaning on one another like a group of drunks. They were infinite in their variety—this one had a balcony, that one had an overhanging roof, one over there had shutters on the windows—and identical in their dreariness, dilapidation, and decrepitude. The smell of water—of fish and slime and sewage—filled the air.

“I’m sure I can find a ship to America from France,” Proctor said. “Are there smugglers down here who will take me there?”

“It’s someone who can get you to France,” Grueby said. “I’ll wait while you go talk to him, if you prefer. But if this doesn’t work, I’ll see if we can find passage for you on one of the military ships.”

“That would be less than ideal,” Proctor said. “Although it would be better than prison.”

“It’s the door on the right,” Grueby said, pointing.

Proctor climbed down from the shay and walked up to the door. Voices inside were having a hushed but heated discussion. Proctor felt like a beggar again, realizing that if he didn’t have enough of Digges’s money left, he’d have to ask Grueby for more. He wiped his palm on his pants and rapped on the wood, which hung so loose it rattled in the frame.

The door opened a crack. Eyes peered at him out of the dark.

“Hello,” Proctor said. “I’m looking for—”

The door opened wide. Thomas Digges stood there. The sailor’s jacket and breeches he wore looked as natural on him as the cook’s apron he had worn when he
brought Proctor food in prison. A shadow stepped out of the dark recesses of the room behind him.

Proctor threw himself through the doorway and wrapped his arms around the second person. He squeezed tight and then thrust her back at arm’s length.

“Lydia! I thought you were dead. I thought I’d never see you again.”

Out in the street, Grueby cracked the reins and the mare pulled the carriage away from the curb. It rolled off into the night.

Digges shut the door. “If I’m that easy to find, I’ll have to change addresses again. I worried that I had been staying here too long.”

“Lydia, I …”

“I’m glad to see you too, Mister Brown.”

“Proctor. You better call me Proctor. How did you—Where did you—?”

She stepped away from him and composed herself again. “I got caught up in the riots, just as you did, I suspect.”

“Were you at Newgate?”

“I was drawn there, like a bee to honey, but when they set it on fire I fled.”

“I arrived as they were pulling prisoners out of the flames. And then the distillery fire—we thought we saw you there.”

“I was there,” she said. They all fell silent for a moment at the memory of that horrible fire, the rioters shot by the troops, the people burned alive. Finally, Lydia said, “John was one of the men they captured and hanged.”

Proctor remembered the ugly craftsman with the delighted smile. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged it off. “He said he didn’t mind going to his death as long as he went as a freeman. After he was killed, I begged …” She hesitated, and he imagined that she was leaving out the use of her talent to ease the way.
“Then I found work as a washerwoman. I’d been saving money, a penny here, a penny there, hoping to save enough to buy my way back to Massachusetts.”

“But you’re free here,” he said.

“It’s an odd sort of freedom. Most of the negroes here are runaways. They’ve been slaves and have escaped. The community is large enough, and the laws prohibit taking and selling them again, so most don’t get caught. But it’s not home. I don’t really belong here.”

“I found her by accident,” Digges said. “She had come down to the docks—”

“To find out how much passage would cost,” she said. “I couldn’t get myself to Spithead, much less France or America.”

“I remembered her, and approached her, and apprised her of your situation in the Tower. We’d been working on ideas to break you free—” Mentioning the Tower brought Digges to a halt. “How did you—?”

“I freed myself,” Proctor said. “But now we have a bigger problem. The Covenant has sailed for America.”

“Dee?” Digges asked.

“Yes, and several of his followers at the least.”

“Dee’s departure doesn’t mean that all the Covenant has gone,” Digges said. “Some of them will remain behind. They still have agents everywhere.”

“If Dee has gone, then he has planned something big, some spell that requires skill and power that only he can master. That can’t be good for America. I plan to follow him and stop him, what ever his plan, what ever the cost.” When he mentioned cost, he wasn’t thinking money, but that brought the purse to mind. He pulled it from his pocket and held it in his palm. It now bulged considerably less than it had when Digges first gave it to him. “Will that get me there?”

Digges took the purse and counted the coins. “By the
time I’m done with you, you will have cost Franklin three hundred pounds. That’s a lot of American prisoners that won’t be set free. That’s a lot of technology that I won’t be able to steal and ship in secret.”

“But you’ve seen what Dee is doing,” Proctor started to argue.

“Yes, it’s worth every cent.” Digges smoothed the point of his beard while he was thinking. “We’ll get you there. I’m just trying to consider the best means of doing it. There’s not much money left. But perhaps Lafayette has not yet sailed for America. And John Paul Jones was refitting his ships at L’Orient. I believe he plans to sail for America.”

“If the best you can do is a rowboat, I’ll row my way home,” Proctor said.

Lydia took a step closer. “I’m coming with you. If the rowboat starts to leak, I can bail water.”

“We’ll do better than that,” Digges promised.

Digges hired a fishing boat to carry them down the Thames, then a smuggler to ferry them across the channel on a dark night.

“I can’t go with you any farther,” Digges said, standing on the smuggler’s strand. “But I hope to see you in Mary land someday.”

“If you make it back across the ocean, I promise I’ll come visit,” Proctor said. Digges offered him his hand, but Proctor embraced him instead.

The smuggler deposited them in Calais, where they engaged a carriage. In less than two weeks, they had reached L’Orient, where they found the
Alliance
flying the Stars and Stripes. It was a thirty-six-gun frigate similar to
La Sensible
, but it was American.

“Who’s her captain?” Proctor asked one of the dock-workers.

The man made a sour face and turned his head to spit. “Captain John Barry. And if you have to speak to him, good luck to you.”

“Is that bad news?” Lydia asked.

“It could be either,” Proctor answered. “Barry believes in divine providence, and does as he feels directed to do. He’s obstinate and has a temper. If he makes up his mind against us, there’s nothing we can do to change it.”

“Is there any good news?” she asked.

“If he decides he likes us, there’s nothing anyone else can do to change his mind.”

Proctor had met Barry before. Back in ’76, with his ship still under construction, Barry had volunteered to fight in the army. He was with the group that fought at the battle of Trenton in late December, though as an aide to General Cadwalader, which meant Proctor had not seen him there. Their paths had crossed during the battle of Princeton several days later, when Barry had led a formidable defense of the American position and was later selected by Washington to act as a courier for the wounded through British lines. Proctor remembered Barry but did not know if Barry would remember him.