A Spell for the Revolution (26 page)

Proctor met Deborah’s eyes and saw that she understood. “I work at headquarters,” he said. “I’ve been here … praying all night. It’s another hour till reveille, but I’d better report back.”

“Of course,” Deborah said.

“It was good to meet you,” John called behind him.

Proctor didn’t answer. Another battle with the Continental soldiers weighed down by the curse could end the war in favor of the British. He didn’t mind the British winning as much as he feared the evil the Covenant might do if they achieved their goal. He sprinted all the way back to headquarters.

The day was cold, gray, and blustery. Every boom of the cannons made Proctor lift his head to the skies to look for thunder, but it was only the British and American forces fighting for control of the big hill west of the little city of White Plains.

There was little for Proctor to do during battle, and there had been almost constant skirmishing for the ten days since their order to move. Part of him itched to be out there with a musket in hand, active in the fighting, but that would tie him down too far. Part of him wanted to flee the fighting and take up the search for the orphan boy and Lydia, still being held by the Covenant, though he knew he had no way to find or free them.

As a result, he never strayed far from Washington’s headquarters, first at Jacob Purdy’s little blockhouse and now on the hillside south of town that overlooked the British forces as they finally marched up the bucolic Bronx River valley below.

The main body of the Continental forces formed their lines behind a thick breastwork of cornstalks covered with earth. It was a strong position; which was why, Proctor supposed, early that morning after the first shots were fired, British General Howe had decided to flank them instead.

Since then the battle had raged all day on Chatterton’s Hill, two hundred feet high, heavily wooded, and overlooking their defenses. Whoever controlled it controlled
the battlefield. The leaves were brilliant hues of red and gold and orange, breathtaking and completely at odds with the bloody business taking place beneath them. Alexander Hamilton’s artillery had formed a hasty battery in the trees and pounded the British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries as they attempted to make their way up the slope.

Hamilton was interesting—he was unaffected by the curse, but only because he already carried a ghost of his own from long before the war started. It had taken Proctor and Deborah some time to realize that, but once they did it explained much about his ability to stay strong and keep those around him motivated to fight.

Today it was dreadful fighting, like the kind Proctor had seen at Bunker Hill outside Boston, only with the British making a more cautious approach and better use of their field pieces.

As the wounded flowed back to the main camp, Proctor fought through the press of men to find Tench Tilghman, Washington’s aide-de-camp. Even after all this time, Proctor found himself fighting not to address him as
sir
.

Tilghman, once he recognized Proctor standing at his side, seemed not to mind. “What is it, Brown?”

“My … sister is off nursing the wounded. If there’s nothing I can do here, I’d like to go help her.”

Tilghman nodded and waved his hand by way of permission, then turned to take a report from another aide. Proctor successfully fought the urge to salute, and he ran to the house where they were treating injured men. It overlooked the Bronx River and, across the river, Chatterton’s Hill, so it provided a good view of the fighting. Many of the townspeople lined up nearby, watching the progress of the battle. Proctor paused beside them.

From this distance, half a mile away, it was all smoke and noise and brightly colored jackets moving slowly up the slopes or hiding in the trees. The British forces were taking terrible losses, but they continued their slow advance
up the hill while their own cannons sent round after round over their heads into the Continental position in the woods. Each volley of the cannons, each hit by the cannonballs from the opposite side, shook the brightly colored leaves from the branches. They fell in a slow shower after each thundering boom.

“I can’t watch,” said a familiar voice beside him. “But I can’t stop watching.”

He turned instantly. Deborah. Exhaustion was reflected in every aspect of her appearance, from the dark circles under her eyes to the hollows in her cheeks to the weakened light of the magic she held in reserve, ready to use at any moment. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she said.

“I’m in awe of what you’ve done the past ten days,” he said. “Over two hundred men cured.”

“And hardly one of them over there, where the fighting is. If the British take the hill, it could all be lost.”

“Don’t worry, Hamilton will hold his men together.” Every night for the past ten days, they’d worked together to break the curse. Luckily, few men were as difficult to free as Livingston had been. “Have you thought more about the way we might help more than one man at a time?”

“Yes, I think I’ve got it,” she said. “Washington?”

They had talked about freeing Washington first, but Proctor couldn’t figure out how it could be done without the general’s cooperation. “There’s no practical way to do it.”

“It’s all or no one then,” Deborah said. “I’ll need a day of sleep before we try. Or maybe a week. And I don’t know if I’ll get any sleep once the wounded start needing nursing.”

“Why aren’t you treating the wounded now?”

“Those well enough to make it back across the river to the camp are well enough to be treated by Doctor McKnight.” McKnight was the army’s surgeon. “But he’s
at North Castle, about eight miles away, so they send the wounded in that direction.”

“Makes sense,” Proctor said, only half attending, the rest of his attention consumed by the battle taking place across the river. “My God, look at Rall’s jaegers!”

A collective gasp and similar exclamations came from others nearby.

The Hessian troops, in their green-and-red jackets, advanced up the hillside through the tall dry grasses. Sparks from the Hessians’ muskets must have set the grass aflame, and a sheet of fire washed down the hillside. The American battery faltered for a moment at the sight of this imminent horror.

The Hessians stayed in formation and marched straight through the flames, covering ground quickly as they went.

“They’ll burn alive,” Deborah whispered. As they continued to march, she asked, “Are they protected by any—”

She left
spell
unsaid. Proctor answered, “No, no, I don’t think so.”

“Then how do they do it?”

“Discipline,” Proctor said. “Discipline and courage.”

All the things they’d been told about the cowardly Hessians were patently untrue. He didn’t think the Continentals could have held together through that. Some of the men would end up horribly burned. All of them would take some hurt.

Deborah’s fingers closed around his hand. He could feel her drawing on her talent again.

Cannons boomed, echoing across the sky for so long that Proctor finally realized it wasn’t cannons but thunder. He looked up and the gray clouds overhead swelled and thickened, like a sponge filled with water.

“Deborah?” he said.

“Not … now …”

“No, you have to look—it’s the German.”

His free hand pointed across the river, to a spot behind
the British lines. A light flared there, supernatural and invisible to those without the talent to see it. But to Proctor it stood out as a beacon, shining like a lighthouse in the night off some rocky shore.

Deborah let go of him and stepped forward for a better view, as if six feet made a difference at this distance.

The air changed, and wind gusted up the valley, tearing the fire across the hillside and away from the Hessian soldiers. The Americans resumed their shooting, but the ground had already been won.

A few fat drops of rain splattered on Proctor’s forehead, reminding him of the battle at Brooklyn when Deborah called in the storms. “Did you … ?”

She shook her head numbly. “I had nothing to do with that wind. How does he do it, Proctor? How does he hold so much power at once?”

“You saw the way Cecily—”

Deborah’s head snapped around, glaring at him.

“—that woman,”
he quickly corrected. “You saw the way that woman stole power from Lydia, making her a slave in two ways. You saw how they snatched up that little orphan boy because of his talent. The German holds so much power because it’s not all his. Who knows how many people he is drawing on to do it, draining away their talent to augment his own?”

“How do we defeat that?”

“The same way we broke his curse on those men—by fighting his strength with cleverness. By outflanking him the way Howe’s troops are trying to outflank us.”

“In five days, it’s the day of All Souls. That would be a very powerful day to attempt our”—she glanced at some of the townspeople nearby—“prayer.”

“It’s only three days to All Hallows’ Eve,” Proctor said, watching the Hessian troops advance another ten yards up the hillside. “That may be as long as we have to prepare.”

Deborah’s shoulders sagged, and her chin fell toward her
chest. “I’d better go rest now while I can,” she said. She turned and left without any word of farewell.

Proctor stood and watched the battle continue in the downpour, until the British and the Hessians drove the Americans from the hilltop.

By then the rain was too thick to see anything.

The rain fell for three days again, just as it had at the battle of Brooklyn. This was two months later in the season, and that much colder. Both armies bivouacked in the swampy conditions, too mired in the muck to continue the fight.

On Thursday, All Hallows’ Eve, Proctor found Deborah in one of the nursing tents. It was empty, all the injured men evacuated north to the new camp. Even under cover of the tent, the ground was soaked, sloshing beneath Proctor’s feet as he entered. Inside was empty, all the beds and tables removed, except for a couple of stools and a lantern.

“We’ll have to do it tonight,” he said. “With the British artillery on the high ground, there’s no way we can hold our position here. The shelling will start as soon as the rain lets up, so Washington plans to withdraw tonight.”

“I know,” Deborah said. She sat on a stool in the driest corner, holding her hands up to the small flame of a lantern for warmth. “I’ve already been told to leave the tent. They’ll be back to pack it up shortly.”

“Are you ready?”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” He had butterflies in his stomach as he said it. They had never attempted a spell this big before, or worked with forces this powerful. “I’ll find a spot out in the woods just north of town where we can”—he checked over his shoulder out of habit—“pray together.”

Deborah nodded. She still hadn’t looked up or met his eye. He took it for deep concentration; it was obvious she had been thinking about the task ahead. In the silence,
drops of rain pattered on the canvas of the tent, as if the sky were drumming its fingers.

“I’ve figured out why the Covenant wants to keep the British empire together,” she said. “Something we spoke about the other day got me thinking.”

That had been puzzling them for more than a year, ever since their encounter with the widow Nance. “What is it?”

“The German draws power from Lydia and the orphan, even though they’re not willing, right?”

He shook the rainwater off his hat and held it. “I suppose so, yes.”

“It’s a focus,” she said.

“I’m not following you.”

“I knew we needed a big prayer tonight,” she said. “So I was thinking about the biggest focus I could handle, and that had me thinking about the biggest focus that might be possible.”

“The empire itself is a focus,” Proctor said. It seemed too vast to be possible, but the moment he said it, he knew it was true.

“Imagine the power of people, millions of them, circling the whole globe, recognizing the same monarch,” Deborah said. “On a day like Coronation Day, for example—”

“That was just last month, the twenty-second.”

“Yes,” she said. “With the Declaration of Independence just this past summer, this is the first year of my life we haven’t celebrated the anniversary of King George’s coronation.”

“We didn’t last year either, not after the rebellion started in Boston.”

“We didn’t, but we were still subjects of the king then and we should have. I felt guilty about not doing it,” she said.

Proctor hadn’t felt guilty at all, but he knew grown men, leaders in the rebellion, who’d had to hide their twitchiness. Some things became reflex over a lifetime.

“If you can get people around the whole globe acknowledging the same thing at roughly the same time, you can create a powerful focus for prayers.”

It was her use of the word
prayers
that gave him a moment’s doubt. “But if that’s true, then you could use religion for the same thing. The Catholic Church covers the whole globe …”

She leaned forward eagerly in her seat, nodding. “Yes,
exactly
. You don’t think the Papists use prayers the same way? Some of the most notorious wit—”