A Spell for the Revolution (38 page)

“You won’t hurt that child,” Magdalena said softly. She stood with her oak-knob cane held before her. Ezra and Abby stood tight at her back. Alex hid behind them.

“Will I not?” Cecily said with a smile, a forced smile, as false as all her others. She kept a shield in front of her: her magic could not touch the others, but theirs could not touch her either. “Do you even know what power the blood of an innocent holds in leash? I think all of you will clear a path to the door for me or I will spill his blood and we shall all see for ourselves.”

Magdalena’s mouth set, hard as mortar, in the old brick of her face.

Abby, who had many brothers and sisters, said, “You can’t let her do that.”

“Hush, child,” Magdalena said. “It is bad enough that we had aught to do with the killing of her soldier. But a man who lives by the gun can fairly expect to die by one. We’ll have naught to do with the death of an innocent child. Everyone clear the door for her.”

They all stepped back, except for Abby. Magdalena rapped her on the ankle with her cane, and she stepped back too.

“See, we’ve cleared your way,” Magdalena told Cecily. “But I think you will discover, once you’re through the door, that there is no place for you to escape. So why don’t you put down your knife?”

Cecily had thought through the same options. Without her driver, with only one witch-slave to draw power from, and surrounded by eight other witches, she had no real chance of escape. “You do not know my master. If I surrender, he shall see that harm comes to me as harvest comes to those who sow.”

“Let us protect you,” Magdalena said firmly.

Cecily had another option—an innocent’s blood to spill. She murmured a spell under her breath. Her knuckles were white on the handle of the knife. When she reached the end of the spell, Proctor knew she meant to slit the boy’s throat and use his power to slice through their shield like a cannonball shot through wooden ramparts, killing as many people in the room as she could.

Proctor struggled against his bonds, rising to his knees. He could ram her, roll into her, do something to distract her.

Only it was too late. Her lips stopped moving. Her eyes narrowed. She drew the knife back an inch to rip open the boy’s throat.

The knife turned red hot in her hand.

She screamed and flung the knife away, but the lace cuff of her sleeve had caught fire. She clawed at it, trying to tear it off or beat out the flames.

Zoe—little Zoe, Captain Mak’s daughter—rushed in from the back room. The orphan boy was the same size, the same age as she was. She wrapped her arms around him and dragged him back through the doorway. Betsy Ross, untied and on her feet, covered both of them protectively and hurried them out of harm’s way.

Proctor didn’t think he would lecture Zoe for using her fire talent in the house, not this time.

However, they were not safe yet. The smell of burned fabric and scorched flesh filled the room along with Cecily’s shrieks. She flailed her arm around, in danger of setting the curtains or the walls aflame.

Ezra grabbed her by the waist and slapped at the fire. “A pitcher, get a pitcher, or a bucket!”

Proctor and Deborah struggled against their bonds, unable to help. Sukey and Esther were doing a dance of panic, trying to hide behind each other. Alex helped Magdalena to the doorway, hoping to force the old woman to escape.

But Abby, like any girl who’d grown up on a farm and seen the damage done by fire, knew the danger. She bolted up the steps, looking for the bath pitcher. She returned seconds later with a pot and poured it on Cecily’s arm. It doused the flames enough for Ezra to throw Cecily to the ground and beat them out.

“My God, girl, the stink,” he said.

Abby set the chamber pot on the floor. “It was all I could find.”

“Bind her mouth at once,” Magdalena ordered.

“She’s hurt bad,” Ezra said, trying to hold Cecily, who rolled around on the floor, weeping. “She needs care.”

“We’ll set to healing her as soon as we’re certain she can’t hurt us,” Magdalena said.

Abby handed Ezra strips of cloth, the leftover bandages that had been scattered on the floor. He gagged her mouth and then started tearing off her burned sleeve.

Alex came over to Proctor. She pulled out a hunting knife with a blade as big as her forearm and sawed through his bonds. “C’mon,” she said. “The easy part’s done. Now we have to break the curse and save Washington’s army.”

He pulled the gag off his mouth. “Is that all?”

An hour later, as darkness fell, the shop looked, except for its occupants, as though nothing unusual had happened.

The cousins took on the task of cleaning up, putting back every item that wasn’t broken, torn, or ruined. Abby scrubbed the floor clean of any sign of bloodshed and burning.

Ezra had rolled Jolly’s body up in yards of canvas and was sewing the canvas shut. “I don’t have any cannonballs to put in the sack,” he said. “But these bricks from out back ought to do the job just as well, sink him straight down to the bottom of the river.”

Magdalena saw to the healing. She set Lydia’s broken collarbone and applied salves to Cecily’s burned arm. Cecily sat, gagged and tied to a chair, in the corner of the room. Alex hid Cecily’s carriage in the alley behind the shop, and then stood sentry at the front window in case anyone came out of the deserted city to investigate.

Betsy served hot coffee and cold food to everyone, while Zoe tried to play with William, the orphan boy, who was back in his dream world again. That left Proctor and Deborah with little to do. They sat next to each other, rubbing circulation back into their limbs.

“I owe you an apology,” Deborah said to Magdalena. The others continued to work as though they’d heard nothing, including the old Dutch woman. “Truly, Magdalena, I must beg your forgiveness.”

“You must do nothing of the sort,” Magdalena said brusquely. The situation clearly embarrassed her.

“No, I must,” Deborah insisted. “I thought myself more fit to teach our students than you were. But in a year of instruction, I was never able to get us to work together as well or powerfully as you did just now.”

Magdalena wrapped a poultice around Cecily’s burned arm, ignoring the woman’s whimpers. She stopped just long enough to wave a finger at Deborah. “You must instruct each woman to do her best, not to do
your
best. You cannot develop
their
talents if you want them all to have
your
talents.”

She slapped the next wet bandage on Cecily’s arm, drawing a yelp of pain behind the gag. Everyone else in the room, including Proctor, held their breath, waiting for Deborah to snap. But Deborah only bowed her head and accepted the rebuke. When Proctor finally breathed in again, he felt that all the other witches had done the same.

“What I don’t understand is how you knew to come here,” Deborah asked Magdalena after the silence.

“He’s the one you ought to ask,” the old woman replied, indicating Proctor.

“You?” Deborah said, turning toward him.

“After the fall of Fort Lee, I knew we needed help,” Proctor said. “So I wrote a letter to Paul Revere. I’m glad he was able to deliver the message. I wasn’t sure it would make it.”

Magdalena tied off a bandage around Cecily’s burned hand. “I could not let these evil Hexen hurt any more people.”

Sukey looked down her long, narrow nose at Proctor. “When Magdalena asked Ezra to accompany her, Esther and I decided that we were not about to be left behind. Were we, dear?”

“Oh, no, we weren’t,” said Esther, her jowls shaking in
affirmation. She indicated Abby and Zoe with a wave of her chubby hand. “We
all
came.”

Proctor sipped the scalding-hot coffee. “That’s why we started the school, isn’t it? So we would have good witches trained to defeat the sorcery of the Covenant.”

“Yes, but …,” Deborah said, although she seemed unsure how she intended to finish.

“We arrived in your camp the same day you left for Philadelphia,” Ezra said to Proctor. “Must have just missed you. Your officer, Tilghman I think, he told us where you were going, and we followed you here.”

The other conversations, the other work, had stopped. Zoe’s voice broke the silence, coming through the doorway to the back room.

“Ip dip dip, my fast ship, sailing on the water, like a cup and saucer.”

There was a hard
thump
as she bounced a small ball on the floor and then a boy’s laughter as he tried to snatch up stone jacks.

Proctor could see Deborah digest all of this. “So you’ve seen the curse?” Deborah asked Magdalena.

The old woman nodded grimly. “It is a worse necromancy than the one that woman attempted on us. I have never seen the kind. It is an abomination.”

“Do you know a way to break the curse without bringing harm to the men who carry the weight of it?” Deborah asked.

Before the old woman could answer, Proctor said, “Should we have this conversation where Cecily can hear it?”

“She’s not going anywhere she can betray us, lad,” Ezra said. “Nor do I care to be carting her around the house like a bale of silk.”

Cecily struggled against her gag, trying desperately to speak. Magdalena studied her thoughtfully, then indicated
that she should be allowed to speak. Ezra reached down and pulled the knot in her mouth aside.

“Allow me to listen,” Cecily said, panting, spitting out words between winces of pain. “Please—I can help you if I know what you plan to do.”

Magdalena turned her head toward Deborah as the two, together, appeared to consider this offer of aid. But Proctor looked to Lydia, who was stiff and stony-faced. She would never speak up, but her reaction was unmistakable.

“No word comes out of that woman’s mouth that isn’t a lie,” he said. “We don’t dare trust her, even if she has no way to speak to her master.”

He took Cecily’s chair in his hands and spun it around to face the wall. “Please,” Cecily begged. “I know I can help you. Just give me a chance to prove myself.”

She continued to beg as he picked up a bandage and tore it in half, wadding up two small strips to plug her ears. As he reached down to stuff the first ear, he saw more clearly the jewels that dangled from her lobes. What he had taken for pearls were tiny heads carved of marble or maybe alabaster. They reminded him of the skulls fashioned from lead balls he had used in the battle of Bunker Hill. Reaching out on impulse, he took an earring in his hand to remove it before plugging her ear.

“Please,” she begged. “You must trust me—No!”

As soon as he touched the earring, she twisted her head around to bite him. She fastened on to the soft skin between thumb and forefinger, thrashing her head back and forth and drawing blood.

“What—?” Ezra said, hesitating, then grabbing her head.

Proctor shoved his free hand in the corner of her mouth, prying her jaws open. He jerked his hand free, squeezing one of the bandages over it to stop the bleeding. Ezra shoved the gag back into Cecily’s mouth, knotting it tighter. She thrashed back and forth, trying to kick away
from the wall. When Proctor reached for the earrings again, she thrashed until Ezra held her still. Proctor removed the earrings and Cecily sobbed, even more than she had at her burns.

The earrings were warm in Proctor’s hands, holding light inside their translucent forms. Now that he examined them closely, he could see the heads were one each, a man and woman, both with their hair pulled back. The ears were etched grotesquely large. As the gems sat in his palm, the light inside them faded. They turned from pearlescent white to a cold, dull gray.

“What are they?” Deborah asked.

Proctor poured them into her cupped hand. “That’s for you to discover. Some sorcery of her master’s. Whatever they are, or were, I care not for them.”

He stuffed cloth strips into Cecily’s ears. Her chin fell onto her chest, and she sobbed through her gag.

“There’s a pantry in the kitchen,” Betsy said. “Perhaps we could shut her inside it.”

Proctor was relieved at the suggestion. He expected someone to protest, but no one did, so he quickly asked Ezra to help lift her chair. They carried her sobbing into the kitchen. The cupboards were already bare. Her chair fit neatly inside, and the shut door muffled her cries.

“The streets are empty outside,” Alex said at the window.

“Perhaps I should be giving the soldier a proper burial then,” Ezra said, pointing to the shrouded body on the floor. “We’re but a couple of blocks from the docks, and it’d be best to do it soon. With this cold in the air, the river could freeze over solid.”

“Give me a moment and I’ll help you,” Proctor said.

“I’ll help him,” Alex said. “You can stay here.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll lend an extra hand,” Abby offered. “Won’t be the first burying I’ve helped with, and I’d just as soon have
Mister Jolly’s body out of here.” The look she exchanged with Alex indicated that the latter had told her what had happened to the bodies of Jolly’s fellow assassins when Cecily’s necromancy raised them from the burial plot on The Farm to kill Deborah’s mother.

“Let me run and fetch her carriage,” Alex said.

She ran out the door. Ezra and Abby picked up either end of the shroud and dragged it to the entrance. The girl might have been the stronger of the two.

“We’ll go upstairs,” Sukey said, covering a yawn. Together she and Esther supported Lydia up the narrow stairs. That left Zoe and the little boy by the fire nibbling at honeyed bread. Betsy went to the children and said, “Come with me. We’ll find a warm room for you to sleep in tonight.”

“C’mon,” Zoe said to the boy. She made eye contact with Proctor as they stood. He gave her a slight nod. They had saved him, just as they’d promised. Zoe winked back as she put her arm around the boy’s shoulders and led him after Betsy.

“A remarkable girl,” Proctor said.

“Hrm,” Magdalena responded. Proctor suspected that she’d been frustrated beyond endurance by Captain Mak’s independent daughter. It gave him his first smile, however small, since Cecily’s appearance.

“You have a plan?” Deborah asked the two of them, lowering her voice to a whisper.