A Spell for the Revolution (36 page)

After a short night’s camp, they continued their ride across the snowy landscape. Alex sat in front of Proctor, with her rifle resting across her legs. She’d held herself rigid, not daring to lean too much into him, despite the bitter cold. Proctor passed the miles by thinking about Deborah and how it would be good to see her for Christmas.

He and Alex approached Philadelphia from the north, passing through rich farmland until at last they saw chimneys rise like row on row of cornstalks, from rooftops spread out like a furrowed field alongside the broad, deep waters of the Delaware River. Proctor thought Boston and New York were big cities, but Philadelphia looked twice as big as either.

“They say forty thousand people live there,” Proctor said.

“It’s wrong,” Alex answered.

“They’ve got to live somewhere, I suppose.”

“No, not the number,” she said. “See how few of the chimneys are in use.”

She was right. Though thousands of chimneys rose into the sky, smoke rose from fewer than half. It was late December, with snow on the ground, and the air below freezing for days. What house would not keep a fire going?

As they passed through the outskirts and into the city, the answer became obvious. Empty houses did not require fires. Up and down the streets they roamed, with every other house boarded up. Whole streets appeared to be
abandoned. In the houses that were occupied, faces peered out and, seeing Alex’s rifle, disappeared again. A few men moved here and there through the streets, but when Proctor called out to them, they hurried away.

“What do they fear?” Alex asked.

“You’d think the British army was one street over,” Proctor said. “Not a state away.”

They made their way into the center of the city. Proctor finally spied the offices of a printer. A man stood out front, smoking his pipe and watching the street.

“Can I buy a paper?” Proctor called.

“None for sale,” the man said. “No one wants to be held to account when Cornwallis comes marching down the street tomorrow or the day after.”

“The British army will never reach these streets,” Proctor said.

The man blew out a ring of smoke, then stepped inside his door and locked it.

“Where’s Mulberry Street?” Proctor yelled. The man pulled his curtains shut.

Eventually, they identified Second and Third Streets, and made their way inward from the docks until they came to Mulberry. There was one upholstery shop on the street, advertised only by the wares in the window. It was a bandbox house, one in a row of similar buildings, two windows wide and winding upward several narrow stories. The windows weren’t boarded up, which was promising. The store was in the front of the first floor: whoever worked here lived in the back half of the house and on the upper floors. He hoped they could lead him to Deborah, tell him where she had gone.

They dismounted, and Proctor tied the horse up out front. The bell hanging above the door rang as they entered.

“Hello,” Proctor called. He heard voices in the back.

The showroom was crowded with goods. In the window
and on the shelves near the front were stacked items no one could afford to purchase during wartime—curtains, umbrellas, Venetian blinds. On the worktable at the back of the room were spread a variety of more practical items: folded tents, blankets, and cartridges, all for the army. Strips of leftover cloth had been rolled for bandages. A pair of shears used for the work lay nearby.

A door opened into the private quarters at the back of the building. The voices of two women came through the doorway, but only one woman entered the showroom as the other stopped short.

The second woman withdrew into the shadows of the back room, but Proctor recognized her at once. His skin tingled all over as he felt her draw power to defend herself. It rolled through the room like heat lightning across a stormy sky, and then went still again, shut off.

“Deborah?”

She didn’t answer, but the shopkeeper, a pleasant young woman with dark hair and a quick smile, turned and looked back. If she wanted direction, she must have received it.

“You must be mistaken,” the shopkeeper said. “There’s no one named Deborah here.”

“Deborah Walcott,” Proctor said. “She’s a friend, and more than a friend.”

The shopkeeper hesitated, then put on a false smile. “If anyone comes by with that name, whom shall I say came calling?”

“Proctor Brown,” Proctor said. Paine had told him that Deborah was asking after him, so why was she hiding? “But she saw me, and knows me by sight.”

Alex took off her hat and shook the snow out of her auburn hair. “Tell her that Alexandra Walker was here also.”

Deborah appeared in the doorway at the sound of Alex’s voice, and then rushed forward, wrapping her arms around
the younger woman. She kissed her cheeks, saying, “Alex, praise the Light. I feared you were dead.”

So that’s how it was, then, Proctor thought. He was as good as dead to Deborah. She would rush out to embrace Alex, but she would hide from him. Her eyes met his, and she looked away at the floor.

“So these are friends of yours?” the shopkeeper said.

“They are,” Deborah said. She took a ribbon from her pocket and circled Proctor and Alex, whirling it around them, saying, “The God of my rock, in Him will we trust. He is our shield, and the horn of our salvation, our high tower, and our refuge, our savior, who savest us from violence.”

Proctor could not say which of his senses had been touched, but he felt a numbness, like the kind that happened to a foot that had fallen asleep. Alex felt it too. “What did you just do?” she asked.

“Agents of the Covenant are here in Philadelphia, searching for women with the talent. I just created a shield that will keep them from sensing your presence, the way I sensed it when you walked through the door.”

“I feel like there’s a layer of oilcloth between my body and the world,” Proctor said. “It’s … odd.”

“I don’t like it,” Alex grumbled.

“The sensation will fade,” Deborah promised. “And it keeps us hidden, and protects our hostess from unjust retribution for coming to our aid. Proctor, Alex, may I introduce you to my dear friend Betsy. She and her husband, John Ross, own this shop.”

Betsy’s head swiveled from Proctor to Deborah and back again.
“This
is the young man you were just telling me about?” she asked.

Deborah blushed, confusing Proctor.

Before he could sort that out, Alex asked another of the questions that was on his mind. “Why were you hiding from us?”

Deborah reached out and squeezed Alex’s hand. “I’m sorry. It was because I thought you were a soldier, yet you did not carry the curse, and yet you had the talent—”

Proctor cleared his throat.

“No, it’s all right,” Deborah said. “Betsy’s family have long been guides on the Quaker Highway. She knows every thing.”

“Samuel and Becky Griscom, my parents,” Betsy said. “There were seventeen children. With so many people in the house, no one noticed when an extra person or two stayed with us a day or two passing through.”

“She knows Magdalena,” Deborah said.

Betsy nodded. “She stayed with us for a night over a year ago, on her way from Lancaster to Salem. I hope she’s well.”

“I haven’t heard from her lately,” Proctor said. “The last we saw her, she was teaching the students that Deborah left behind.”

The mention of her students touched a raw nerve for Deborah, who seemed eager to change the subject. “When I saw you with a witch disguised as a soldier, I thought it was someone from the Covenant, come to find me at last.”

“What did you think, that they’d made a slave of me, without me knowing?”

She flinched. The accusation cut deeper than he intended, hitting another, rawer nerve. “They’ve been spreading panic among the leaders of the rebellion,” she said.

“Another curse?” Proctor asked.

“There are not enough tormented souls to spare,” she said, still refusing to meet his eyes. “But the effect is very similar. Someone has been moving through the city, casting seeds of fear among the leading men. From there it spreads like a fever, leaping house-to-house upon each street, even though we are yet far from the front lines of the war.”

“I am lucky that Deborah came to us when she did,” Betsy said. “She was able to protect our shop.”

“You must say nothing to her husband, John, when he returns,” Deborah said. “He knows nothing of the talent.”

“Is he not a Friend?” Proctor asked.

“He is not,” Betsy said. “He was raised in the Church of England. We were apprenticed together, in Webster’s upholstery shop. We fell in love and married against the wishes of our families.”

Proctor’s respect for Betsy increased. Few people were that brave, and fewer still prospered after, with the judgment of the community against them. “Do you ever regret your decision?” he asked.

“Not once, not even for a second,” she said. “We’ve been happy together, and have done good work. He is serving with the militia now, readying the city against a possible attack. He only knows that Deborah is an old friend of my family.”

“I was lucky that Betsy recalled the code of the highway,” Deborah said.

Shadows paused outside the shop’s display window, a group of three or four—a man and wife, perhaps a servant and child. Proctor, seeing them, said, “Maybe we should continue this conversation in back, in case someone enters.”

“Business has been slow,” Betsy admitted. “I’d be grateful for any sale.”

“We’ll stay out of your way,” Proctor said.

Deborah chivvied Proctor and Alex into the back room while Betsy went to answer the bell at the door. Muted voices came from the front room. Another table, also covered with work, crowded the back room, along with a pair of chairs. The tight space forced Proctor and Deborah to stand near each other. He hadn’t been this close to her in weeks. For the moment, it was as though they stood alone.

“I’m sorry,” Deborah said softly. She blinked back tears. “What I did was wrong. No circumstance excuses it.”

He found his breath taken from him. “You don’t have to ask for my forgiveness.”

“No, but I do need to earn it. I have to find a way to make things right.”

Make things right? She’d been gone for weeks, without sending any word to him. “You can’t make things right by running away.”

“I’m not running away.” She turned to the table and picked up a piece of fabric. “I’ve been looking for other ways to defeat the Covenant.”

“You plan to distract them with brightly colored bits of cloth while the rest of us sneak up and bang them on the head?”

She scowled at him. “No, I was thinking about the things we’d talked about, how the Covenant wants to use the empire, King George himself, as a focus for their magic. In America, we have no such focus for the common power. We all identify each with our separate states. Every state has a different leader, a different capital, a different flag.”

“We have the grand union flag,” he said.

“Yes, and it includes the Union Jack. As if we’ve never let go of Britain. Think about it, Proctor. Even with the Continental Congress, we all look to our local representative, not the body as a whole. Our national focus is divided, and that makes us more vulnerable to the curse.”

Deborah could be so smart. “There’s the Declaration of Independence,” Proctor offered. “We all shared in that.”

“We did,” Deborah said. “And we shared in Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
. Those words united us as a people. But it’s not enough; those two things have passed.”

“There’s Paine’s new pamphlet,” Proctor said.

Deborah nodded eagerly, as if he understood now. “I opened the floodgates and let the full measure of my power flow into Paine as he wrote that first page. I couldn’t help
myself, not with his … guardian angel lending her hand. Only later did I consider the possible benefits of it. But I doubt that any soldiers will stop to read his words during the smoke and slash of battle, and that’s when their course is most easily changed by the spectral riders at their reins.”

He saw the point she was driving toward. “There needs to be a simple focus, a symbol that all men share.”

“Yes,” Deborah answered, holding up a piece of cloth with red and white stripes, and stars on a field of blue. “Then I met Betsy and she was working on a banner for the Pennsylvania navy—”

“Uh,” Alex said, conveying a world of panic with that single syllable. She stood in the doorway, peering into the front room. A muffled squeal of fear came from Betsy as Alex turned to run, her eyes as big as silver dollars.

Proctor and Deborah leapt forward together, pinning Alex between them and carrying her into the doorway, where they all froze.

In the front room, Betsy was bound by strips of cloth, hands tied to her sides, ankles wound together, mouth gagged.

That would have been remarkable by itself, but she also floated a full foot above the floor, the toes of her shoes dangling, stretching for something to touch.

Yet what made her squeal through the gag were the shears. The pointed ends floated in midair an inch from her eyes, scissoring open and shut.

Across from Betsy stood a petite blond woman, wearing a silk dress worth more than a farm. The glee written on her face at Betsy’s fear and discomfort chilled Proctor like the coldest wind. Cecily Sumpter Pinckney. Behind her stood Jolly, Lydia, and the orphan boy.

“You,” growled Deborah.

Cecily stepped back, startled. Her expression flashed from glee to fury, as though there was little difference between
the two. Betsy collapsed against the floor. Cecily flicked her fingertips, and the shears flew at Deborah’s face.

Proctor snatched them out of the air, clicking them shut in his fist. There was no magic involved, just his reflexes.

Deborah drew on her talent, flinging items at Cecily the way she’d flung stones at the barn. Folded curtains flew across the room, rolls of cloth unfurled in the air, and a set of Venetian blinds clattered as they came at Cecily from every direction.

Cecily passed her arm across her body, and the items all flew back at the doorway where Deborah and Proctor stood, the heavy fabric pelting them. The blinds smacked Proctor across the face, and when he shook off the stars and saw clearly again, yards of cloth were swirling around Deborah, binding her tightly.