A Spell for the Revolution (18 page)

“Do I look like a slave to you? No, sir. My father, he’s as free as a seagull, comes and goes as he pleases, accounting to no man. Mostly goes, which is why my mother says he’s
a no-account. I would have said something to you there, but the stable master won’t let me hang around his boys if’n he knows I’m taking work away from them now and then.”

“We’ll be happy to take you up on your offer,” Deborah said, reaching into her purse. She counted coins into the boy’s palm. “Will this be quite enough?”

“I think you ought to give me a few shillings more,” the boy said.

“I’m sorry, but that’s all that I have.”

“Then it’ll be plenty,” the boy said, shoving them in his pocket.

Proctor jumped from the carriage and offered a hand to help Deborah step down after him. The boy bounded into the seat, and repeated the destination back to them several times to make sure he had it right.

“The sooner it gets there, the happier the major will be,” Proctor said.

“I understand,” the boy said. “I know the roads all the way out there, and can make the trip as fast as anyone.” He snapped the reins. “Yah!”

The carriage bounced down the road, across the rural landscape, quickly diminishing into the distance.

“I hope we have not put the boy in any danger,” Proctor said.

“We are in too much danger ourselves,” Deborah replied. “Let us hope that the carriage leaves a trail that misleads Bootzamon for a day or so, while our feet carry us as far away from him as we can go.”

They walked to a crossroads and turned westward. “Did you really give the boy the last of our coins?” Proctor asked.

“Yes,” she said, looking stubbornly ahead.

“How could you do that?”

“I didn’t bring much money because I didn’t expect us to be gone this long,” she said.

“We’ll need something to get across the river to the city,” Proctor said. He tried not to be angry, but their options were narrowing rapidly just when they needed more.

“We’ll figure something out,” she said. “Besides, it was all I could do for putting him in danger.”

It was five or six miles from the place they’d left the carriage in Flushing to the western shore of the island. Proctor felt unnaturally tired even before they started, likely a reaction to the surge of fear he’d experienced back at the farmhouse on the arrival of Cecily and the German. But Deborah was even more weary. He worried about her. It was one thing for him to travel this way, exposed to constant dangers. But he didn’t think it was right to do the same thing to her. By rights, she ought to be back at her farm.

Or was it
their
farm? As he helped her along, offering her his arm, steadying her when she seemed ready to topple, he wondered if it truly was their farm. Where did things stand between them now? The lie was becoming the reality. The more they pretended to be brother and sister, the more their relationship became like that of siblings, a bond of strong affection and shared experience, but no more.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Proctor said, shaken from his reveries.

“I’ve asked you twice what we will do once we reach the coast, but you haven’t heard me. You seem so pensive.”

“I was thinking about The Farm,” Proctor said.

Deborah nodded her head. “It has been much on my mind as well.”

“How so?”

“Thinking about my students.”

“Ah,” Proctor said.

“If I’d had to worry about protecting them too when we faced that woman and the German, he might have taken us all.”

“I hope they’re safe,” Proctor said.

“Yes,” Deborah agreed.

They both fell silent as soon as she said it, and they both knew they had no way of knowing. A different vision of The Farm crossed Proctor’s mind, one more like Alexandra Walker’s farm. The fields abandoned, the doors hanging open, bodies tossed like clumps of bloody rags into corners and under tables.

Deborah knew what he was thinking, because she reached out and squeezed his arm to reassure him. At the touch of her fingertips, he felt some of that old electric spark pass between them again. “They’re safer there than they would be anywhere else,” she said. “We’ve put every protection we know into that farm.”

“But as you said yourself, is it enough? Can we really stand against the power that the Covenant possesses?” He regretted the question as soon as he asked it. While Deborah was still forming her response, he answered his own question. “Yes.”

“What?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we can stand against that power. The colonies united can stand against the king and all his might. And our school, small as it is, can stand against the power of the Covenant. This is our home. We have courage because we stand on our own doorstep and tell the unwanted guests they cannot enter. We will never be bullied at our own hearth.”

His fists were clenched by the time he finished speaking. He glanced at Deborah, almost embarrassed by his outburst, but she stared at him, suppressing a smile, her face aglow.

“I like you that way,” she said.

“What way is that? Spouting off at the mouth?” he said, feeling slightly deflated. Remembering that they were in a Loyalist stronghold, he looked quickly up and down the road to make sure no other travelers were close enough to hear them.

“No, that way you have of filling up with light until it spills over, light so bright it makes me want to shield my eyes to look at you.”

“Now you’re mocking me,” he said.

She shook her head.

“But it does make me think—maybe we’ve been wanting too little.”

“What do you mean?”

“All we want is to prevent this Covenant from doing harm to us. We want to be safe from them. That’s not enough.”

Her mouth fell open. “It seems like a tall order to me right now.”

“We ought to prevent them from doing harm to anyone. They come from overseas, from Europe. The widow, she was from London. Cecily’s new master sounds like he’s from one of the German states.”

“Hesse, maybe, like the soldiers?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But the point is, whatever evil they mean to do here, they’re doing over there as well. When we defeat them here—and we will defeat them—we need to take the battle to the rest of them, and not let them murder or take from people the way they’ve taken from us.”

“How’re we going to do that?”

“You’ve said that you want to get through the war and then turn The Farm back into a school for healing, the way your mother ran it. But that’s not enough. All the years she ran it, the Covenant was out there, unchecked, using their unnatural talents to do the devil’s work. I think we’re called to stop them.”

“Don’t be too hasty,” she said. “Let the Light—”

“The Light already shines in it, can’t you see? Why were we introduced to the widow, and allowed to defeat her? There was providence at play, and not just luck. The same thing when I encountered Bootzamon at the Walker farm. He should have been able to kill me easily, but I turned the tables on him. And back at the Stymiests’ farm—if we’d had to depend on my spell alone, we would have been captured. Was it chance that you were in the house, or that I used the grain, or was it divine will?”

Deborah walked on silently, her head lowered. At last, she said, “I will have to think on this.”

“I know you long for a return to peace, to the old way that your mother and father did things—”

“I said, I will have to think on it.”

That would have to do for now. He let her fall silent.

The channel that separated Long Island and Manhattan was called the Narrows. It was formed by the confluence of the Harlem River and the East River. Their currents churned around an island. British ships moved up and down the channel, into both rivers, their masts as thick as the trees of the forests.

“How are we going to cross that?” Deborah asked.

“If we were squirrels, we could cross over as easy as jumping from branch to branch,” Proctor said.

She fell silent, chewing her lower lip as she stared out across the water.

“Um, you aren’t planning to transform us into squirrels, are you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Because I’m not always sure what you can and can’t do anymore.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Remember how the widow Nance made us think she was a panther and then a bear—”

“And a flock of crows. But all of those were just illusions.”

Illusions or not, the widow Nance’s transformations and escape had been Proctor’s first glimpse of the real power of magic, and it had shaken him and everything he knew. Or maybe it was just his first meeting with Deborah that had shaken him.

“Too bad illusions won’t get us across the channel,” he said. “What were you thinking about?”

She hesitated. “How important is it for us to get across there today? At all?”

“Important,” he said. “We’ve got the German and Cecily and Bootzamon behind us, and the curse on all those Continental soldiers ahead of us. We need to escape the one problem and fix the other.”

“We have another problem,” Deborah said hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“Money.”

“Do we have any friends on the other side? People who might know you from the highway?”

“My mother traded letters with a Mary Murray. I don’t know that she has a talent, but she was a correspondent of my mother and a friend to peace.”

“Where is she?”

“Somewhere near Kip’s Bay, wherever that may be.”

“That’s south of here, near where the Redcoats beat the Continentals. But I think the army’s retreating north.”

Deborah lowered her head. She looked so fragile.

“We’ll figure out a way,” Proctor said. “I’ll find work for a few days if I must. We’ll go throw ourselves on this Mary’s mercy. We’ll find someone else to call on.” He knew someone else in Manhattan now, but he didn’t want to think about calling there for mercy. Not yet. Not at all. “It’ll be all right. I can find work again.”

She released her breath and touched her heart. “Let us
take nothing for our journey. Neither staffs nor scrip, neither bread nor money.”

Her knees wobbled as she spoke, and he reached out to catch her. A slight thrill ran through him again, the way it did whenever he touched her. It caught him off-guard, and he staggered a step before he righted her again.

“Idly quoting scripture?” Proctor said.

“It’s no idle quote. I was trying to cast a spell for luck.”

“Trying?” She seldom tried things she didn’t succeed at.

“I’m too drained. But there,” she said, straightening herself and smoothing her dress. “There, I think that will do just fine.”

Seeing the strain still on her face, he said, “As long as you aren’t turning us into squirrels.”

“That would be lucky,” she suggested in the same serious tone of voice.

Proctor laughed, then felt wrong for laughing. He glanced over his shoulder at once to make sure the German or Bootzamon hadn’t stolen up on them in that instant that he let down his guard. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large coin.

“I have a single dollar,” he said. “I’ve been saving it for an emergency.”

“Now
that
is lucky.”

They found a sailor to take them across in a little sixteen-foot boat with a single sail.

It tacked and dodged the bigger ships like a dog in a herd of sheep. It bounced and skipped over the wakes, fighting the churning currents as they flowed over the mass of submerged ledges, rocks, and underwater traps.

“Why is it called Hell Gate?” Proctor asked.

“Because everyone who crosses here intends to reach the other side.”

Proctor was puzzled.

“And we all know the way to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The sailor was still chortling at his joke when the boat bucked again, then cracked sharply off a rock. Deborah gasped and clutched the sides of the boat. Proctor worried too. “Is there something I can do to help?”

“No,” the man said. “She can take worse beatings than that. It’s just a little tricky when the tides change—”

He stopped talking and pushed his shoulder into the rudder as the current tried to spin them around sideways.

“Dear God,” Proctor said. “Will you please rebuke the wind and the raging of the water?”

“There you go,” the man said. “You can never go wrong with a bit of prayer.”

The waters went slack for a moment, as still as the surface of a lake on a windless morning. The sky and the clouds showed in the surface of the water, and beneath the surface lurked the ominous bulks of keel breakers.

The boat shot forward. When the sailor had landed them on the far shore, he turned to Proctor. “You got the ear of the Lord?”

“No more than any other man,” Proctor said.

“I never saw anything like that, all the years I’ve been crossing the Narrows.” He reached into his pocket and gave them their dollar back. “I was going to cross anyway. That’s for an easy voyage.”

Deborah reached out and snatched up the coin. “Thank you, friend.”

They found a road and started walking across the island. “Do you think it really made a difference?” Proctor asked. “My spell on the boat? Your spell for luck? How can we tell when our spells work, and when events have happened to fall in our favor?”