Traitor to the Crown (38 page)

The ship appeared ready to sail. The hull had been scrubbed clean of the moss and barnacles that slowed ships down; the wood gleamed through the clear glass of the water. Everything was stored on the deck, the sails were furled, and the crew, as scarred and sullen a lot as Proctor had ever seen, hung over the sides of the ship or dangled their feet from the masts.

They found the captain on the deck. Barry was a giant, standing almost a foot taller than most of the men who surrounded him. He was as broad as he was tall, with a jaw as square as his shoulders and a small mole on the bridge of his nose that made his eyebrows look perpetually folded down in anger. When he spoke, he
still had the Irish accent that he carried with him from the country of his birth. He held a Bible in his hand when he thumped across the deck to speak to Proctor and Lydia.

“Proctor Brown, sir,” Proctor said. “And this is Lydia Freeman. We’re Americans. I served with General Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. We’ve been in Paris with Doctor Franklin on a mission from Major Tallmadge, but now we need passage home.”

“That’s a mouthful of names in one breath,” Barry said. “I don’t suppose you have a letter from Doctor Franklin.”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“I don’t have room for passengers, nor can I in good conscience take them on. We may be called into battle at any time. I’ve had a ship battered to splinters beneath my feet and had to sink it to keep it from falling into British hands. That’s one thing when we’re a day off the coast of our own country, but with this ship, and this mission, it could happen in the middle of the sea, with neither shore nor rescue to be had.”

“Yes, sir. We understand.”

He hoped his use of
sir
reflected a military urgency to Barry. When Proctor had served with Washington, he had presented himself as a Quaker and had never used military courtesies or forms of address. But he was a different man now, in many ways.

That might have been the problem. Barry studied Proctor’s face for a moment and then looked down at his right hand, where the scar was re-forming over the knuckle of his missing pinkie. If he recognized Proctor, he wasn’t going to say so. Proctor opened his mouth to remind him of the courier duty with the wounded soldiers, but Barry waved the Bible in the air.

“I was just reading to the crew,” he said. “It has a
salubrious effect on their disposition, and puts them in the proper frame of mind to show obedience. Do you mind if I see what the Good Book says?”

“Please,” Proctor said. He sifted his brain frantically for a passage that would be a good omen, and a spell to open the page to it, but before he’d solved even the first part of the equation Barry flung open his Bible and thumped a finger down blindly on a page. When he read it, he laughed until his cheeks colored.

“Welcome aboard,” Barry said, clapping Proctor on the shoulder so hard he nearly knocked him off his feet. “Welcome aboard.”

“What did it say?” Proctor asked.

“John, chapter six, verse twenty-one, my friend. John six: twenty-one.”

He turned away to call for one of the crewmen to find a place aboard for their passengers. Proctor whispered to Lydia, “What’s John six: twenty-one say?”

She shook her head. “But maybe there is divine providence at work here. Maybe there’s something back in America so bad, you’re the only one who can stop it.”

Proctor chewed on that thought. If he had stayed in America, then Dee wouldn’t have freed the demon that attacked King George. But if Proctor had stayed in America, and Dee found some other way to release it, then Proctor would not have been there to help the king. There were too many ifs. Divine providence or demonic providence, either seemed just as likely an interpretation.

Barry came back and Proctor decided to ask him outright, as he knew the captain was not a man who changed his mind. “What is John six: twenty-one? It’s the miracles on Galilee, but …”

Barry nodded, still grinning. “That’s right. The verse says, ‘Then they willingly received him into the ship and immediately the ship was at the land wither they went.’”
He pointed to a French ship at another dock. “Do you see that letter of marque?”

“Yes,” Proctor said. It was an Indiaman, a large merchant ship fitted out with, it appeared, about forty guns. At least as many as the
Alliance
carried.

“That’s the
Marquis de Lafayette
,” Barry said. “It carries over a million livres of cargo—twenty-six eighteen-pounders, fifteen thousand gun barrels, a hundred tons of saltpeter, and uniforms for ten thousand men. That’s every penny Congress has left, and it’s all going to General Washington to give him a fighting chance to stop Cornwallis. So if I willingly receive you into the ship and immediately the ship is at the land we’re heading for, then I say welcome aboard.” He turned to his first officer, a man with a rough, functional appearance about him, much like an old doglock musket. “Mister Hacker.”

“Sir?”

“Enter our passenger in the log as Mister Trent,” Barry said. “He wants to serve as a volunteer in the American army. Don’t mention the woman with him—I don’t want to explain her—but find her a spot away from the men.”

“Sir,” Hacker said, and turned away.

“See, I do remember you from Trenton,” Barry said. “Though you weren’t regular army then, any more than I suspect you are now. Will that suit?”

“It will suit very well,” Proctor said.

“I almost signed you on to the crew as a landsman,” Barry said. “We’ve been taking every American we could find from any French ship, just to get us up to fighting strength. Which reminds me—”

Without another word of explanation or excuse, he turned to yell instructions to another one of his officers.

Lydia scuffed her feet across the deck and put her hands on her hips. “Here we are on another ship, headed right
back where we came from. I lived through blood and fire. But what did we accomplish? Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Proctor said. He wasn’t willing to accept that the last eighteen months had accomplished nothing. “We found out who the Covenant is. We discovered their plan.” He had saved King George III—he hadn’t mentioned that to Digges or Lydia. He wasn’t sure he ever would. “Maybe it is divine providence at work.”

“Maybe that creature possessed Deborah, and now we’ve got to stop her before Dee gets to her first and tells her what to do.”

“Stop it,” Proctor said.

Lydia took a step back and frowned at him.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” Proctor told her.

“Don’t believe it or don’t want to believe it?” she said. The question hung in the air unanswered until she shook her head. “I think I’ll go find Lieutenant Hacker and see where my quarters are. I’m likely to be in them for most of the voyage.”

Proctor turned and grabbed hold of the rigging. The hemp rope felt as rough as a hangman’s noose in his palms. Deborah possessed by the demon? He didn’t believe it. But he knew that he didn’t want to believe it either.

He looked for Lydia and saw a different familiar face instead: his old friend from
La Sensible
, Jack Tar. Jack glimpsed Proctor and immediately made himself busy, disappearing from view.

Barry had said that they were taking aboard Americans from French ships. But what did divine providence have in mind with this?

The winds were contrary for a week, and the French pi lot refused to lead them through the narrow channel out of port. Every day, messengers came back and forth from the
Lafayette
, from Paris, from the shipyards.
Proctor felt like all of them were watching him. Finally, on March 29, under a steady breeze that smelled like bad weather, they followed the
Lafayette
to the open sea.

At dusk Proctor was standing in the bow of the ship because it made him feel that much closer to home. Now that they were under way, and home seemed like a possibility again instead of just another word, Proctor grew desperate to know what had happened to Deborah and Maggie.

There was a way he might be able to find out.

“Let a reef out of the topsails,” Barry ordered from the quarterdeck in his booming voice. “Unbend the cables and set up the back stays.”

The men swarmed through the rigging and across the deck to do his bidding. The ship jumped through the waves, and Proctor tasted the salt in the spray that flew over the side into his face. A sailor called out from the tops to the
Lafayette
, which sailed nearby. An answer came back over the water. Proctor couldn’t understand but the man in the tops laughed. Barry ordered a light hung from the stern so that the
Lafayette
could follow them in the dark.

When the other passengers and most of the crew went belowdeck for the night, Proctor lingered above, acting as if he needed to use the head. Darkness fell suddenly and wholly at sea, and the moment it did, he made his way instead to the chicken coops. If he could get his hand on an egg, he could scrye.

He reached hopefully into the first cage, poking his hand through the straw while the hen bustled and nipped at him, but there was no egg. None in the second, either, nor the third. He checked every cage twice, but none of the chickens had laid yet.

“What’s going on over here?” asked a voice, responding to the annoyed clucks of the chickens.

Proctor dived into the shadows behind the cages and said a quick spell to conceal himself. A shadow approached, paused at the cages, and then moved on.

Despite having no bowl or water or candles, Proctor felt confident he could still scrye if he had an egg for his focus: he understood now that he was sacrificing the future of the chick in that egg to see a different future. But he was willing to pay that price. If only he had an egg.

He settled down into the shadows and waited for one of the chickens to lay. As he waited, he peered through the broken clouds at the stars. If the sky was infinite in every direction, and there were more stars in the heavens than grains of sand on a beach, then could his actions make a difference? Did his efforts have any effect? Had he done the right thing by leaving Deborah to hunt the Covenant?
Were she and Maggie safe?

The chickens began to rustle again and Proctor prepared to check the cages again, hopeful for an egg. As he rose, he saw a man clambering down the foremast while two other men approached through the dark. Proctor slipped back into the shadows.

“Patrick, is that you?” whispered the man just come out of the foretop.

“I’m going to slit your throat if you say my name again,” whispered Patrick.

“I was talking to the other Patrick, Patrick Shelden.”

“Shh,” said a third man, Shelden. “We don’t want to be heard.”

“Are we ready to do it then?” Patrick asked.

“They’re ready aboard the other ship,” the top man said. “Their man will be waiting for our signal.”

Proctor leaned toward the conversation. The other ship was waiting for what signal?

“Good,” Patrick said. He turned his head and spat a fat glob of tobacco—it landed just inches from Proctor’s face. “Crawford is ready, and Crooks and Mallady.
We’ll kill all the officers and the passengers, everybody but Fletcher, and we’ll make him navigate us to Ireland.”

Mutiny? Divine providence, indeed, Proctor thought bitterly.

“Do we have to kill all of them?” Shelden asked.

“Yes, we have to kill them,” Patrick sneered. “You want to wait until we come up against a British first-rate, seventy-four guns? You know what Barry does to his ships. He looks for battles, gets his ships sunk and his crews killed. Better he and a few officers die now than all of us later.”

“I think he meant the passengers,” the top man asked.

“Don’t worry about the passengers, if it bothers you,” Patrick said. “I’ll take care of them personally. Especially that one named Trent.”

Proctor tensed. Why did they want him dead especially?

“Who’s the buyer for the ship when we reach Ireland?” Shelden asked.

“Dee,” Patrick said. “His name is Dee.”

Proctor was stunned.

“What is this Dee, some kind of privateer?” Shelden asked.

“Why do you got so many questions?” Patrick asked.

“You know me, I won’t breathe a word, not even if Barry puts hot iron to my skin. I just want to know who we’re dealing with, in case anything goes wrong.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong, not to me,” Patrick said. “And Dee’s doing this because he believes in England and the empire. He says we’re all Englishmen, we’re all part of one empire, and that’s the way it ought to be. He’s spending his own fortune on it. You saw the gold he gave us.”

Proctor was still shaking his head. How far was Dee’s reach? If he truly spoke with angels and demons, could they see the future and tell him what to do and when to
act? The Americans desperately needed the supplies aboard the
Lafayette
. Was this aimed at stopping that ship or was it aimed at stopping Proctor as well? How could you defeat a witch that powerful, with a reach that far?

“Spent all my gold drinking,” the top man said.

“That’s how Crooks and Mallady ended up in the brig,” Shelden said.

“Well, they’re out now,” Patrick said. “We wait until tomorrow night, when we’ve left the bay, and then we strike on my signal. Got it?”

The other two understood. The top man climbed back up in the rigging. Shelden scurried off through the shadows also. Patrick rose to leave, but Hacker, the first officer, called out, “Who’s fore? Name yourself.”

Patrick crouched down on the opposite side of the chicken crates. The birds flapped their wings, raising the smell of damp feathers. Proctor peered through the crates at the ringleader. No talent at all in him, unless it was a talent for murder. But then they already knew that Dee would use anyone for his purposes.

Proctor was keenly aware of every sound—the footsteps on the quarterdeck, the creak of the wood, the slap of the sails, the strain of the ropes. Mostly he listened to the waves: every few rolls one thumped the side of the ship, sending water rushing over the rail.

The ship rolled, and Patrick crouched.

The wood creaked, and he made ready to dart to safety.