Traitor to the Crown (7 page)

“I was walking through the orchard,” Abigail said, and then she hesitated.

“Go on,” Deborah told her.

“There were strangers, men—well, young men, boys really—walking through the rows on either side of me. I kept trying to spy them through the trees, but I couldn’t see their faces. I starting calling out their names, and I remember I was laughing, like we were playing a game.” She grinned, remembering the dream, then noticed everyone else looking at her and her expression grew serious again. “I chased one of the boys. I couldn’t see him clearly, just glimpses of him as he rounded the trees, always ahead of me. I was holding up my skirts in my hands, and they were feeling very heavy, and I ran around one of the apple trees, and suddenly it was night. Magdalena was standing there, only she was dressed in white and silver. She looked young and she was laughing with me.”

“I don’t know that I ever saw Magdalena laugh much,” Proctor said.

“She suffered constant pain from her injuries after the Covenant’s first attack on The Farm,” Deborah said. “She and my mother laughed together often, but that was years ago. I was a little girl.”

Abigail leaned forward earnestly. “It seemed perfectly normal in the dream.”

“Did she say anything to you?” Deborah asked.

“I think she was going to, but I was so excited to see her that I turned around to call you. That’s when I woke up. And that’s when I became scared. Realizing that it was a dream, but not a dream. Well, that and Lydia, sitting awake, staring out the window as if she’d seen a ghost.”

“And didn’t I?” Lydia asked.

“What did you dream, Deborah?” Proctor asked.

Deborah stared at Maggie and started to rock back and forth. “Magdalena was at the foot of the bed, and I was still in labor with Maggie. I pushed and pushed.” She kissed Maggie’s forehead and the baby grabbed at her face. “But Maggie refused to be born. Magdalena looked over my swollen belly and said, ‘You and the boy will be a grave danger to each other.’”

“Boy?” asked Abigail. “Like the one I saw in the orchard?”

Lydia snorted. “I think any man too young to have gray hair was a boy to that old woman. I heard her call Ezra
young man
once when she was mad at him.”

But Proctor’s heart had already sunk in his chest. “She meant me,” he answered. He held up his scarred hand, turning it from side to side to show the missing finger. “The necromancer still has a part of me. As long as he does, I’m a danger to Deborah and Maggie, I’m a danger to all of you. That’s what Magdalena’s spirit told me.”

No one said anything for a moment. No one looked at one another. The only sounds in the room was the crack of a log in the fire followed by Maggie’s coo.

“What are you going to do?” Abigail asked. Her hands had bunched into fists, as if she was ready to protect herself and Deborah that very instant if needed.

Proctor had no doubts about her fierceness. Just as he had no doubts about his own. “I’m going to go after
the Covenant,” he said. “I’m going to find the man who maimed me—the prince-bishop, this German necromancer who serves the Covenant. I’m going to find him, I’m going to destroy his gruesome little collection and him, and I’m going to claim what’s mine so that nobody can ever use me or my spirit to harm those I love.”

“But didn’t he sail for England?”

Proctor went over to their writing desk and opened the lid. He hooked the chain to hold it up, then sorted through the small stack of letters. He found the one he wanted and held it out to the group.

“General Washington asked me to follow—here, let me read it.” The paper crackled as he unfolded the letter. General Washington’s precise but hurried script, telling him that his special services were needed yet again. With it was another page in Tallmadge’s handwriting, laying out the details. Tallmadge had an agent who left the letters in a hollow tree outside the gate where Proctor could retrieve them later. “They want me to accompany John Adams on a diplomatic mission to France and the Netherlands. Adams has been given authority to negotiate with England directly, so they hope he may even be welcomed onto their shores. Washington’s worried about a secret effort to wreck Adams’s diplomacy. They are certain there is a spy following Adams and they hope my talents can uncover him.” He looked at the date of Adams’s approximate departure and his heart fell. There was a small bundle of letters with the original, introductions he could use if he chose to go.

“It’s even possible that the spy is a member of the Covenant,” Lydia said. “Looking for one may lead you to the other.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Abigail said, her fists still at the ready.

“Yes, it’s possible that the Covenant will be behind the effort to wreck Adams’s diplomacy. Yes, accompanying
Adams is a good plan.” It was their only plan. He folded the letter and slapped it on the table. “You’ll all be safer when I’m gone.”

Deborah had noticed his gesture with the letter. “How soon must you go?” she asked. Her voice was flat, deliberately emotionless.

“Today,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow. They’re expected to sail by week’s end.”

Another uncomfortable silence with averted eyes followed this announcement. It was one thing to know a departure was imminent, and another to find out that it had to be immediate.

“But you don’t even know what you’ll do when you get there,” Deborah said. “You have no idea how you’ll find the Covenant.”

“I’ll think of something. I always do. I just … I have to start someplace.” He rubbed his face and tried to think. “Most of the harvest is in already. It’s more than enough to carry you through the winter. Abigail and Lydia can help out with anything else that needs to be done. I don’t expect you’ll run low on firewood, but if you do there’s plenty of deadfall in the trees behind the field corn.”

“I’m going with you,” Lydia announced.

Abigail grabbed the other woman’s arm. “No, I don’t want you to go.”

“If I have to pass through blood and fire, then I best make sure that blood and fire is as far away from you as possible. And think about it—I spent my whole life serving a witch who served the Covenant. I can recognize them, and I know how they do some of the things they do. It only makes sense that I go along.”

As soon as she said it, it seemed obvious to Proctor, so much so that he wondered why he hadn’t considered it himself. Still, he had reservations. He didn’t know what he was going to face and didn’t want to put anyone else
in danger. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “I don’t know how we’d explain the two of us traveling together.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Believe me, you don’t need to be a witch to be invisible. I’ll go—” She hesitated, as if the word was hard to spit out. “I’ll go as a slave. If people think I’m your slave, I’ll be as good as invisible to them.”

Deborah shook her head firmly. “I don’t care for even the appearance of slavery. It does irreparable harm to both the master as well as the slave.”

Proctor agreed. “Now that you have your freedom, I could never ask you to act the slave again. I won’t do it.”

“It is a false pride not to do what must be done,” Lydia said. “All those years I traveled with Miss Cecily as her slave, I pretended to myself that I was free. Now that I’m free, I can travel one more time, pretending to the world I’m a slave. Especially if it will defeat men who would make slaves of us all.”

Deborah would not let go. “For all we know, there may be blood and fire here as well,” she said. “You don’t need to go looking for it on our account.”

“That may be true,” Lydia said. “But you’ve been good to me, better than I have had any reason to expect, after what Miss Cecily did here. If I go away, and blood and fire shows up here as well, at least I’ll know it’s not because of me.”

Proctor would not argue that point with her. It was too similar to his own motivations for going.

Deborah turned to him, her chin set firm, her voice trembling and bitter. “I thought you were done doing work for Washington, done with making sacrifices for your country.”

“I’m still a patriot. I still want to see our country free, and I’ll do my part to make that happen. But let’s be clear about one thing.” He looked Deborah in the eye and fought to control the emotion in his voice. “I’m not doing this just for Washington or my country. I’m doing
it for you and for our daughter, and God help any man on any side of this war who gets in my way.”

His traveling bag hung on a peg by the door. He rose and put the letter, with its accompanying papers of introduction, into the bag. A gesture to make his decision final.

The fire had burned down and now cast the room in a dull, even glow. Outside the window, the sky quickened toward dawn. Maggie squirmed in Deborah’s arms. Deborah’s face, for once, looked bleak and defeated.

“It’s as good a time as any for us to do the spell,” she said at last. She turned to Abigail. “Will you go fetch the box with Maggie’s cord and all the rest of it?”

Dawn rose on a tiny crib set in the shelter of a tree.

They gathered at the edge of the orchard. Deborah had positioned them at the four points of the compass, around the dead patch of ground where Cecily’s black magic had once raised corpses.

“Are you certain this is the right place to do this?” Proctor asked. He could see the same question on Abigail’s face, though Lydia’s expression was hard to read. At one time, Deborah would have worked to bring everyone to a consensus, but for this spell she simply told them where it was going to happen.

“Absolutely,” she answered. “We will confront evil directly wherever it attacks us. On this farm, we will always answer fear with love and the blunt force of violence with the irresistible persistence of peace. When they leave a mark of destruction, we will turn it into a garden of hope.”

It was a message for him. It would be more convincing if she didn’t sound angry when she said it. She wasn’t going to change his mind. He didn’t think the Covenant was going to be stopped by love or peace or hope. It wasn’t that kind of world.

Maggie made noises for attention, but they sounded more curious than distressed.

“Proctor?” Deborah said.

He stepped forward with the spade. Suppressing a spasm of revulsion at the memory of the vile thing he’d
fought here years ago, he jammed the spade into the ground and dug the hole. The soil was dead and full of gravel. A barrow full of garden compost, black with leaf mold and alive with worms, sat off to one side. Proctor scooped several spadefuls into the hole.

“Abigail,” Deborah said.

Abigail held a small box wrapped in cloth. Maggie’s afterbirth and cord. She knelt by the hole and gently lowered it to the bottom. When she stepped out of the way, Proctor dumped another spade of compost in the hole. Clumps of dirt pattered over the box.

“Lydia,” Deborah prompted.

Lydia had a small apple tree at her feet, a large root-ball with three and a half feet of slender trunk. It had been her memory that led to this spell, so Deborah had asked her to choose the tree. She knew exactly the one she had wanted, and Proctor had dug it up in the dark.

She bent over, grabbing the trunk by the base near the roots. She swung the tree back and forth for momentum, shedding dirt each time it brushed against her leg. She let go when it was out over the hole and it dropped solidly into place. The top of the root-ball mounded just over the lip of the hole. Proctor made a circle of compost around the tree, moving clockwise and filling in the edges. After he patted the dirt down, continuing his clockwise motion, he placed the spade outside the circle and then returned to his position.

Deborah held a pitcher of water. She circled the tree in the same direction as Proctor, pouring until the pitcher was empty. Then she set it aside with the spade and returned to her position. She stood at the north point of the compass, Proctor at the east, Lydia at the south, and Abigail at the west.

Maggie’s cries had grown a little more insistent. Proctor looked over to make sure she was fine, but Deborah said, “Everyone stay with me for a moment longer.”

She held out her hands. Proctor closed his hand around hers and felt Lydia grab his other. The power started with Deborah and flowed through them, like water moving a mill wheel, but returning with more strength every time it passed through. He counted four slow pulses of energy, marked by the tingling of his skin and the hair rising on his neck. As the fourth pulse completed the circle, Deborah spoke.

“Deliver us from our enemies, O our God,” she said, and they all repeated the phrase after her. “Defend us from those who rise against us. Deliver us from the workers of iniquity and save us from bloody men. For lo, they lie in wait for our soul.”

When he chorused the last phrase with the others, he felt a sting in the severed joint where his finger had been, and he realized that she intended the spell to protect him as much as she meant it to protect The Farm. Maybe she wasn’t even protecting The Farm at all.

“Fight against those that fight against us,” she said, quoting the Psalm, and they repeated the phrase. “Take hold of Your shield and buckler, and stand up for our help. Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after our souls.”

The final chorus ended and the flow of power subsided. Deborah let go, and they all dropped their hands. The ghost-sting in Proctor’s finger faded. Maybe he had just imagined it. Knowing Deborah, she had worked the spell in her head to encompass him, Maggie, and The Farm. But dividing the focus that much might weaken the spell. It might leave her unprotected.

“Let this tree be dedicated to Magdalena Elizabeth Brown,” Deborah said. “Let no one eat of it who is not willing to shelter her when she needs shelter, feed her when she needs food, comfort her when she needs comfort, and protect her when she needs protection.”

She would never ask anyone to take a vow or swear an
oath, so
willing
was as strong as she would make her statement.

“I am willing,” Proctor said with the other two.

“Let this tree grow as Magdalena grows, let it be a shelter when she needs shelter, a source of fruit when she needs something to eat, a comfort and a protection to her all her life.”