A Spell for the Revolution (16 page)

“Deborah, this is the fellow I was telling you about,” Proctor said. “Increase, this is my sister Deborah.”

Increase stirred, but only a little. His ghost was hard to see in the sun, but it had been an immense man in life, half a foot taller than Increase and five or six stone heavier. Its only wound was one small hole through his leg. The shot must have hit an artery, causing him to bleed out.

“Have you been sick?” Deborah said.

“Heartsick,” Increase replied with a wan smile. “Your brother said you were a healer, but I doubt you can heal that.”

Deborah had brought some fresh mint with her for a focus. “The scent will distract him,” she explained to Proctor. She asked Increase to cup his hands as she poured mint into them. “Lean forward, close your eyes, and breathe in the fragrance,” she said.

He did as she directed. When his eyes were closed, she poured the rest in a circle around him. She created a thick line at his back, where the ghost hung over his shoulder. Then she said to the ghost under her breath, “Devil, I cast thee out.”

The ghost erupted in fury, beating its big hands as if Increase’s head were a drum. Increase spilled the handful of mint and grasped his temples.

“What did you do?” he cried. “It hurts so bad, I want to die. What did you do to me?”

The ghost continued to beat on his head until Deborah retreated from him. Proctor apologized profusely, and they made their excuses to go.

“That didn’t go well,” he said. “Why didn’t it work?”

“I think it didn’t work because the ghosts aren’t devils. They’re just trapped souls. But I don’t know what verse or spell to use to break that.” She looked sick again herself, weary to the point of fainting. “I am sorry, I am so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Your intentions were good. Don’t you always tell me that intentions matter?”

“They do—but he is in so much agony. His spirit is sick. Do you think all the soldiers are afflicted like this?”

“I wish I knew,” he said.

“Let’s stop at The Farm and get our things,” Deborah said. “We’ll go back into Gravesend and try to find the orphan and Lydia. I only hope that Lydia can help us.”

“Is she free enough to do that now?” Proctor asked. “She wasn’t last year, on The Farm.”

“I don’t know,” Deborah admitted. A grim determination forced its way past her sickly pallor. “But I know we have to do something, and do it soon.”

“That’s God’s truth,” Proctor said. They walked along fields ready for harvest. “I wish we were back at our farm.”

She looked at him oddly when he said
our farm
, and immediately he regretted it. “See what kind of food you can gather from the garden or the orchard,” she said. “I’ll see what I can get from the kitchen.”

They split up when they returned to the farm. Deborah went into the house, while Proctor gathered their few belongings from the barn. He went out to the garden and the orchard, filling their travel bag with carrots and squash
from the garden, the last few plums, and some almost ripened apples.

When he returned to the house for Deborah, he saw a one-horse shay tied up out front. He stopped on the doorstep before entering. There were voices in the parlor. One of them spoke clear English, but it was slightly accented, like a foreign spice in a familiar dish. Proctor leaned against the house, creeping closer to the window until he could make out words.

“M-m-my lord, my lady,” Mrs. Stymiest stammered. “We’re not prepared to receive such grace in our humble house. Let go that dress, Sissy!”

“The house would be adequate if you would but teach the children manners,” said a cold, familiar voice.

That southern woman
.

“We understand that you have two new servants working for you,” said the slightly foreign voice. If Cecily was here, the other voice had to be the German.

“Y-y-yes, my lord.”

“They are my indentured servants and have escaped my service.”

“Y-y-you must be mistaken. They’re Quakers, brother and sister. The young man has a Massachusetts accent—”

“I’m not mistaken.”

“I knew they were trouble the moment I saw them,” Mr. Stymiest said. “The worst sort of thieves and scoundrels. They lazed around, pretending to be sick. Hardly did any work at all.”

“I want them returned immediately,” the German said. “We are departing for Manhattan to rejoin the army, and I wish to take them with me.”

“Yes, my lord,” the farmer said.

“There will be a reward for any loyal subject who assists me. And consequences for anyone I find who has aided these servants in their rebellion.”

Fear shot through Proctor. He had to bind this man inside
so he could find Deborah and escape, but he didn’t have any salt to hand. What did he have?

He ran to the feed trough and scooped handfuls of millet into a basket formed by holding up the front hem of his shirt. It had just been harvested, so that would draw extra strength into it.

He crouched, spreading a circle around the house as he went, saying an entrapment spell. He was nearly around the third corner when he heard the door open and jerked back just in time. The farmer called out their names.

The door banged shut.

“They’re off hiding from work again,” the farmer said. “But we’ll find them.”

“I-I-I still don’t believe it,” the wife said. “She seemed like such a sweet young woman—”

“Many things are not what they seem,” the German said. “They are thieves and vandals.”

And you’re murderers and necromancers, thought Proctor. He crawled around the corner, sprinkling grain and focusing on his spell. He was concentrating so intently he barely heard the whispered “Psst.”

He froze, glancing from side to side.

“Psst.”

The sound was louder and directly above him. He looked up and saw Deborah climbing out of a second-story window. As soon as she caught his eye, she dropped. Her skirts slapped the clapboards once, and then he threw out his arms, wrapping her tight and rolling to the ground.

Cecily’s voice came from inside. “What was that?”

“Is there someone upstairs?” the husband asked.

“I’m sure there isn’t,” his wife said. “All the children are down here. I checked when I went up there and they said it was empty.”

Deborah tore herself free of Proctor’s surprised grip. She snatched up the spilled grain and repaired the circle where they’d disturbed it, whispering a spell under her breath.

“Those two servants are closer than you think,” the German said. “Perhaps you should take my lady with you and look again.”

Proctor grabbed the rest of the grain and tossed it across the doorway to reach the circle on the other side. He thought he’d done a good job, and he nodded toward the road. But Deborah repeated his motion with more grain, lips moving to her own spell, before she took his hand. They crouched off together toward the barn.

He felt angry that she didn’t trust his spell. Before he could decide whether to say anything, Cecily shouted triumphantly from the upstairs window.

“There they are.”

Cecily stood there, dressed in purple silks, her hand pointing out the window Deborah had just dropped from.

The door opened and into its frame strode the German. He was a large man in every dimension. His clothes were well made, cut to his frame, but not as ostentatious as Cecily’s. It was impossible to look at him for long, just as it was impossible to stare at the sun without going blind. Proctor averted his eyes and found his memory of the German fading as quickly as he looked away.

Deborah pulled at his sleeve.

The German took two long strides forward and reached the barrier of Proctor’s spell. He slammed into it like a sled hitting a tree and staggered back, bowling into the farmer and his wife, who had followed him through the door.

“Hurry,” Deborah whispered.

Proctor ran after her. His improvised barrier would not last long against a witch with that much power. The German stepped up to the ring of seed and, just as Bootzamon had done, summoned a wind to blow it away.

“Get down!” Deborah cried, pulling Proctor off the road into the cover of a hedge.

Wind rushed in from every direction at once, tearing birds out of the sky and branches from the trees. It thundered
like an avalanche into the house, with a sound like a thousand hammers hitting a thousand planks. The German and the farmers were slammed off their feet and back through the door. The shutters fell from the house and clattered to the ground. A single child began to cry.

“What just happened?” Proctor asked.

“Later,” she said. “That doesn’t buy us more than an extra quarter hour.”

She took off running down the road, but Proctor heard a horse whinny anxiously at the side of the road and spotted the German’s shay. He ran to it, freed the reins, and climbed aboard. He steered the horse onto the road after Deborah, reaching down to pull her aboard as he caught up.

“We’ll hang for thieves,” she yelled, holding on to her cap. The rattle of the carriage and the pounding of the horse’s hooves all but drowned out her voice.

“That may be a better fate than the one awaiting us if the German catches us first.” He looked for the whip and snapped it against the horse’s flank, driving them at a dangerous pace up the road. “What happened back there?”

“You almost trapped me inside the house with your spell,” she accused.

“They said you weren’t there.”

“When I saw
that woman
coming, I cast a hiding spell and made the children forget they’d seen me. But once the German entered the house, I was afraid he would detect me.”

“How? How can he do that?”

“How should I know?” She sounded frightened. “I’ve never encountered a talent so ablaze.”

“The Light of God?” Proctor asked.

“More like the fires of hell. I added a spell to your barrier—and may I ask, why grain?”

“That’s all I could find.”

“You might as well tie a horse with string as hold him back with grain,” she said.

“What spell did you add?”

“I remembered how that Bootzamon creature summoned wind to wreck your circle of salt,” she said, looking back. The Farm was too distant to be seen now. “I suspect the creature came from this man, and I took a chance he would use the same spell. So I used the grain to make the next spell cast increase by tenfold, twentyfold, a hundredfold.”

“So the grain was perfect,” Proctor said smugly.

He reined the horses in abruptly, bending them around an old man with a cart. As they rattled on down the road, people came out of their houses to see them and shout at them to slow down. Proctor turned to Deborah to ask her how she’d done the spell and saw her speaking a new one under her breath. She touched the sideboard, her knee, his knee.

“There,” she said. “Those who see us pass will think we are the German and Cecily.”

A shiver, perhaps of revulsion, ran through Proctor’s body. “I’m not sure I like to be mistaken for either one of them.”

“Better that than being caught.”

“True.” At the back of his brain, he had a niggling worry. How had Deborah become so powerful she could improvise spells like that in the heat of the moment? He still needed practice, and it went better when he could stay calm. But she didn’t seem to need any of that. “We’ll be caught anyway,” he said.

“What makes you think so?”

“They’ll follow the carriage and find out where we’ve gone. We can’t hide it, or our passage.”

“Oh,” she said.

The road was so rough that it rattled his teeth nearly out of his head. He reined in the horse and slowed to an easier
pace. It wouldn’t do to be too sore from riding to walk. And it wouldn’t do at all if they broke a wheel or cracked an axle before they had gone very far away.

“Thank you,” Deborah said, relieved at the slower, less bone-jarring pace.

“You’re welcome,” Proctor said. He touched the scar on his neck, thinking of the musket ball that had nearly taken his life at the battle of Lexington. “That was a bit too close.”

She nodded, her face drawn. “It will get closer still before we’re done.”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“We’ve found the witch who is powerful enough to put the curse on Washington and all the Continental soldiers. But we still have no idea how we can break it.”

The carriage rolled into the town of Jamaica. Long Island towns were less orderly than the New England villages that Proctor knew. Normally, he looked for green, meetinghouse, and taverns, in that order. But Jamaica was laid out along the length of the road like a market. The principal church in town was a stone edifice with a steeple topped by a weathercock. The building was so vain by New England standards that Proctor mistook it for a merchant’s mansion.

“We need to find someone to take the carriage east for us,” Proctor said. “To throw them off our trail while we double back to the west.”

“We’ll have to be careful,” Deborah said as they rolled past a group of British soldiers. “Most of the people who remain here are probably Tories, just as in Gravesend. What are we going to tell them?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We’ll say that we’re loaning it to a British officer in Sag Harbor, for his use here.”